Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Eglin AFB Off Road

Now that I'm caught up on posting, I can get to a little adventure I had exploring the vast Eglin AFB reservation in North West FL. The Eglin reservation is 720,000 acres of north Florida woods and coastline. I only had the day to get out so my destination was the northern area along the Shoal River, just south of Crestview. This is what my GPS looked like for most of the day! Luckily, Linda husband Glenn had a map of the reservation, so I had at least some Idea where I was.


The main road leading from Hwy 85 to Hwy 87 for some 25 or so miles. This is the road I based most of my side trips off of, it's a nicely graded wide dirt road, which is more than I can say for most of the side roads. That's Ok because if all the roads were like this, they wouldn't be worth exploring.


Most of the side roads were just narrow sandy two tracks.



I did manage to find a unnamed road back to a beautiful spot along the Shoal River. I was thinking what a great canoe trip this would be, we may have to give it a try next time we make it by this way.



The roads varied from the wide open main one, to open sandy ones to travelling through some pretty dense vegetation. Sheryl is always pleased when she sees the Jeep with dirt, mud and one more scratch after my outings. I think she's beginning not to buy the phrase "but honey, they'll buff right out".....lol. Then again, if I actually buffed them out that would help..lol.


And now a shot for our northern friends, 73 and blue Sky's, what a great day.


Being north Florida, there are several creeks running through the area. Thought we'd test the water by just dipping a toe in, ohoooo cool crisp spring water, nice.


That was pretty much the adventure, not alot of mud slinging and rock crawling, more just exploring the North West Florida backroads. It was a great day and nice just to get out into nature's beauty.

2 comments:

Paul and Marti Dahl said...

Nice, rub it in with that shot of the temperature! Glad you didn't freeze your tire off with that dip in the "cool" creek...

Nice off road pictures, you sure do find some unique places that are not normally seen in RV blogs.

Our clock is ticking down, we'll be out there soon, too.

Conrad said...

That GPS shot is why I have a handheld loaded with only Topo mapping. It may not be completely accurate, but it's better than an empty screen!