Many years ago, Chuck and his brother, Jerry, would take a few vacation days every year and come to Florida fishing. Most of the time, they would go to Lake Okeechobee. You may remember from our post earlier in the year where we found the campground where they used to stay.
Well, one year they decided to try something different and check out several of the other lakes in Florida. All of our families have heard Chuck and Jerry speak of fond memories of these trips and Chuck wanted to see if he could find some of the places where they had fished and camped before.
We headed east towards Astor Park and Astor, Florida. We drove down a couple of roads trying to find where they had camped and fished around Half Moon Lake and along the St. John River but nothing looked familiar to Chuck.
We drove across the St. Johns River and found a restaurant they had gone to and even went inside to check it out. The hostess was very kind and told us we were welcome to look around. Of course, the original restaurant business was no longer there and several restaurants had operated out of that building since then. Now, it is the Castaways Restaurant and it must be pretty good because it was very crowded for it being the middle of Sunday afternoon.
After we left the restaurant, I zoomed up Google Maps and found a campground on the St. Johns River that was not too far away. We drove to Powells Campground and Chuck is pretty sure that this is where they camped.
He called Jerry to see what he remembered about the campground.
What is so funny about their camping adventure here (although it wasn't at the time), is they both got very sunburned. They got so sunburned that even their lips were sunburned and they could barely talk much less laugh about it. I remember them telling us about their stopping at a McDonalds on their way back home and how the cashier could not understand what they were ordering because they could barely talk with their sunburned lips.
After leaving the St Johns River, we headed back towards Silver Springs. We saw a sign for Half Moon Lake and drove down this very long sand road...
and followed the sign at the fork in the road
and down an even more sandy, bumpy road thickly lined with trees.
By this time, I'm beginning to wonder how Chuck and Jerry ever found this place. Way back then, they didn't have Google Maps, a GPS, a cell phone, or a smartphone. They may have had a map but that is all that "road-map Jerry" needed to get them there. Sure enough, within a couple of hundred yards, we reached Half Moon Lake.
It was fun spending the day going down Chuck's memory lane of some old fishing trips. And you know how it is with old fish stories. They just keep getting bigger and better!
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