January 12, 2022
Heading south on the Withlacoochie Trail
Day 2 riding with the Women’s 60 plus biking group. South from Inverness on the straight as an arrow Withlacoochie trail. Pretty flat riding today, in 42 miles we only had about 600 feet of elevation.
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The Withlacoochie trail passes through several small towns, past lakes, cypress swamps, parks and a wildlife management area. The surroundings are typical rural central Florida all the way. There are restroom facilities periodically as well as lots of benches and quite a few picnic shelters.
At one of the parks you can get to the lake, boat launching ramp, and a fishing pier along side some cypress trees with lots of cypress knees all around.
We rode down to mile marker 8 and then stopped for a snack and rode back leaving the last part of the trail for another day. Not too long before we turned around the Good Neighbor trail to Brooksville intersected with the Withlacoochie. We’ll have to explore that next time.
The Withlacoochie is a rail trail and all along the trail are markers left over from when this was a rail line. The markers are evenly spaced apart at about 1 mile increments.
This part of Florida is horse country and we saw horses, some large horse farms, and other livestock such as sheep and goats.
After riding we explored Floral City one of the trail side towns. Unfortunately we got there just as everything was closing up at 4:00. We checked out the trail side bike shop and a thrift shop as they were closing and then headed to Ferris Groves for milkshakes. The trail side sign advertising fresh strawberry milkshakes is what pulled us in. Yum!
Tomorrow we head north on the Withlacoochie to explore the other end of the trail.
Today's ride: 42 miles (68 km)
Total: 695 miles (1,118 km)
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