We woke with a jump when a clap of thunder let loose right above our bed. Yikes! It did that two more times and then it started to pour. We laid awake listening to the rain for awhile. It was only 6:30 AM. We got up and got going as we were leaving today. While we had breakfast, Bob spotted this hawk which landed on the Jeep.

Auggie got his walk in between rain showers. The rain held off while we unhooked from the water and power and while we hooked up the Jeep. We had a reservation at this campground for 5 nights, paid for 3 (just in case we had to leave early), but only stayed for 2 nights. The campground was nice enough to give us a voucher for the 1 night we paid for but didn’t stay, so we can use it when we come back this way again. We have 1 year in which to use our voucher. They don’t give refunds and neither does the campground in Cedar Key that we reserved for 3 nights. We’re hoping Cedar Key will issue a refund or voucher due to the hurricane threat in their area. We’ll have to wait until Tuesday when our reservation would have begun to find out what’s going to happen.

We pulled out at 9:15 and crossed the West Bay to Panama City.

From there, we took Highway 231 north to I-10. We would cruise on I-10 all the way to Lake City and our campground for tonight. Traffic was pretty light. We could see signs of downed trees from the last tropical storm that came through this way. We crossed the Apalachicola River which was flowing pretty quickly.

The Panhandle of Florida has such pretty terrain with rolling, wooded hills.

The sun peeked out for awhile before we ran into some rain showers that were coming up from the south. We changed time zones about 25 miles west of Tallahassee. We lost an hour and were now in the Eastern Time Zone. As we entered the city of Tallahassee, we encountered the rain which continued off and on, but mostly on, for the rest of the drive. Near Monticello, we hit a traffic slowdown due to this accident. Traffic kept moving slowly, but at least it was moving. We had seen an ambulance going the other direction a few minutes earlier which must have been taking the driver to the hospital because there was no one at the scene of the accident except the police.

We arrived at Casey Jones RV Park at 2:45.

We were given pull-through site #53, a grassy site out in the field, so we could stay hooked up to the Jeep.

It had stopped raining while we checked in and did our setup. Auggie got a quick walk and was greeted by a friendly family of squirrels. He wanted to see them up close and personal, but we heard thunder off in the distance and had to go inside. The rain came after that. It continued to rain for a couple of hours, but stopped in time for Bob to cook some chicken on the grill. We have one more day of 200 miles of driving to get home.