Leaving Anastasia SP, head into St. Augustine and turn right at the foot of the bridge. Follow South Castillo Dr. around the fort and turn left at West Castillo Dr. At the end of the street, US 1, turn right.

Proceed northward. US 1 is a good road up in these parts with few traffic lights and little traffic. Just past Bayard turn right on the I 295 / CR 9A bypass around Jacksonville. Again, a good smooth road with very little traffic at mid-day.

An alternate is to go up A1A and take the Mayport Ferry, then continue up A1A through Amelia Island; this time we weren’t planning to stop at Little Talbot SP, Fort Clinch or anywhere on Amelia Island so it would’ve been fiddling around for several hours with town traffic for no real purpose.

After about 20 miles or so turn right on US 17.  Smooth road, no traffic. After another 20 miles or so turn right directly onto I 95; this a short jog that dumps us off at the front gate of the Kings Bay sub base and on the road straight to Crooked River SP. From I 95 take the exit to St. Marys Rd. and follow the small brown signs to the park. You basically go to the sub base gate and hang a left.

SR 40 is a great east-west road across north central Florida between Ocala and Ormond Beach; although it’s two-lane it’s nice and smooth and there’s hardly any traffic between the eastside of Ocala and I-95 at Ormond Beach. This leg takes us off SR 40 northward to St. Augustine without once touching an Interstate.

Leaving Astor, where there are several RV campgrounds, we head east on SR 40 and over the drawbridge over the St. John’s River. After a few miles we come to US 17; from here we could proceed up US 17 throught Palatka and Green Cove Springs as we did a couple of years ago, and even on into Jacksonville but that’s reserved for masochists.s So we’re going to proceed east on SR 40.

A few miles more and we head north on SR 11 towards Bunnell. It’s pretty amazing, very smooth and virtually no traffic. After zipping up SR 11 at 55 or so, we proceed straight through the small town of Bunnell on SR 100. There’s a change past Bunnell; we encounter the occasional traffic light and shopping center. Flagler County’s expanding westward and you can just feel all those huge developments crouching just out of sight.

After a few more traffic lights and shopping centers, up over a bridge over the ICW and the stunning Atlantic Ocean greets us.

Hang a right on SR A1A and there’s the Flagler Beach Pier, the pier that half-collapsed in a hurricane and we’ve been seeing it on the Weather Channel for at least the past 10 years, but we’re not going that way so hang a left towards St. Augustine. This is actually a very nice drive with the Atlantic _right there_ quite a ways north until Hammock Dunes. We do, however, have to pay attention because beachgoers are parked alongside and hanging into this stretch of highway, and we don’t want to present them a Darwin Award.

There’s a couple of interesting stops up past Hammock (and I distinctly recall a giant orange that was missing today); on the left is Washington Oaks Gardens SP. It’s a formal gardens and house once owned by a distant relative on George Washington, and on the right is an ancillary day-use area informally called “the rocks.”

“The rocks” is a coquina aggregate outcrop reaching from Washington Oaks northward to Anastasia Island; I believe there are only two rocky beach outcrops in Florida, they are “the rocks” and at Blowing Rocks Beach in south Florida. As rocky beaches go it ain’t much but we do what we can do. The significance of the coquina outcrop was that the Spanish mined coquina from Anastasia Island and built a fort at St. Augustine that was never reduced or captured.

Past “the rocks” is Marineland, a very early Florida attraction featuring jumping dolphins. Marineland has descended down to state/county ownership; there’s obvious marine lab activity going on and it’s come up from it’ s caretaker status of a few years ago. It was once _why_ people visited Florida. They came down US 1 in search of Flipper and the big almighty  orange.

We’ll trundle past Marineland through several nondescript beachfont communities/condo developments of no interest to anyone other than dweebs until we get to St. Augustine Beach ; the character changes to a certain funkiness. Around about Alligator Farm, Lighthouse Park and Anastasia SP we see closed restaurants, bustling shell shops and honest’to’god  chelation therapy. It’s like we’ve crossed to the other side of the tracks..sorta.

We’re ending at Anastasia SP. The park entrance is confusing with Lighthouse Park but if that flummoxes you perhaps you should stay home and watch TV.

First we start with zipping up I-75 to SR 50 just east of Brooksville. It’s not real exciting and we always try to avoid interstates but there’s no other way that’s not a slow go because of sprawled little towns and their traffic lights. Zephyrhills is one of the worst with traffic and construction and no particular town, just congestion.

So up I-75 we go. Just when it gets painfully boring we drop off onto SR 50 and head east across the Green Swamp. Yes there’s swamp and also uplands, horse farms, a sawmill, a limerock mine; we pass through Ridge Manor, Lacoochee, Mascotte and Groveland. To the east the towns are migrant-farmworker Hispanic-majority towns. They appear to have mostly recovered from the economic devastation we saw a couple of years ago but there’s still a lot of for-rent signs and empty storefronts.

In Groveland we head north on SR 19 through Tavares, Eustis and Umatilla. Old-line old-time Florida towns that grew up along the railroads but the railroads were short-lived unlike Atlantic Coast Line and Seaboard.

A little past Altoona the roadside scenery gets really different; there’s pretty much nothing but pine trees and white sand ridges; we’ve entered the southern Ocala National Forest. This area is the eastern side of the Ocala Ridge, the ancient spine of Florida, and the sand we see and the ridges we drive over were once big sand dunes long before there was such a thing as a human being.

For the third time in a row I missed the turn on CR 445A so we went a little  bit out of the way but eventually turned east on SR 40; in due time we came to Astor Park and then Astor, where we turned off to Astor Landing.

It was an interesting little jaunt; we got from North Tampa to close to the east coast without encountering any significant city traffic; in fact once we got off I-75 we encountered hardly any traffic at all. And that’s just the way we like it.

The next installment will be Astor to St. Augustine; we’ll once again avoid interstates, cities and traffic. Stay tuned.