Kingsland, GA to Jacksonville, FL

48.1 mi / 12.6 mph / 237 ft. climbing
Home: Hanna Park Campground

The breakfast at our Super 8 motel wasn’t anything spectacular, but there was coffee, cereal, and hot waffles, and hell, our three most-recent restaurant breakfasts have each cost more than the $49.75 that this entire overnight stay did (and it’s comparable to what private campgrounds charge)! I sure hope that the motel is using its low rates to attract customers who will build up its Google rating, which will then allow them to charge more in the future. Because it was an entirely clean, comfortable, quiet, friendly, and functional place to stay, worthy of a good rating, and it seems like they must be losing money on us! $10 of what we paid goes to taxes, so they need to clean and restock our room for less than $39 in order to make it a better deal for them than just leaving the room empty. Seems challenging!

A flat $5 of that tax is added to every hotel stay in Georgia, statutorily allocated to the Department of Transportation. I’m always happy to pay taxes, especially when they feel worthwhile. And we’re about to exit the state without hitting a single bit of rough road (excepting of course the historic streets of Savannah). Yes, they should pave wider shoulders and seek treatment for their addiction to rumble strips, but I’ve never been in a state with such consistently-good surface quality on their roads. Maybe that’s actually due to the non-freezing climate, and the $5 tax is actually going to post anti-trans signs in every rest stop bathroom or something, but it at least feels like the tax isn’t being wasted!

South of Kingsland, the railroad tracks still exist on the right-of-way, while they’ve been pulled up for trail conversion north of Kingsland. That bridge doesn’t make me think that they’re terribly active though.

Another abandoned property along US-17 in Georgia. This one, a motel, makes us glad that people like Susan in Jacksonboro have made the effort to keep their roadside motels alive!

Four miles in, we crossed Saint Marys River, bringing us into our 27th US state, Florida! The rumble strips disappeared, the shoulder got wider, and the surface remained smooth. The East Coast Greenway map shows relatively-few “stressful” sections between the border and Key West, and we’re given an early indication why.

We’re excited about lines 1, 3, and 4 on the largest state border sign we’ve seen (less excited about lines 2 and 5…but I guess it’s good to know that DeSantis isn’t turning Florida back into a slave state…? I can’t imagine Georgia appreciates the implication though…???)

A bit more space on Florida’s US-17, though also with increasing traffic as we headed south, and the fact that the drivers see us as having our own space means they pass too close and fast.

We left the woods behind when we turned onto the massive suburbanized 6-lane A1A (Jimmy Buffett Memorial!) Highway. But the quality bike facilities continued; not only were there bike lanes, there were also continuous sidewalks on both sides of the highway (a surprisingly rare concession to non-drivers in exurban America). And the bike-friendly nods continued throughout the rest of the day, no matter what type of road we were on. It reminded me of Delaware; both states seem to say “it’s flat, we have space, why not just include space for multiple uses on our roadways?” Today’s Florida politics don’t scream “bike friendly” to me, but thankfully sometime in the past there were people in government doing good work for all of Florida’s citizens (and visitors). And that work has resulted in us seeing people riding bicycles on the roads for essentially the first time since Virginia Beach! Including the first bike tourers (going the other way, so we didn’t talk) since Massachusetts!

Three traffic lanes, a bike lane, and a well-designed sidewalk. Multiply that by two, add a median, and it’s a highway corridor even Jimmy Buffett would love!

The bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway to Amelia Island reveals an unusual spot for a VFW Hall.

A land/water ratio that we haven’t quite seen before in the many Atlantic wetlands we’ve passed over.

A sign designated this gorgeous section of Buccaneer Trail as a “Canopy Road”, with a caution to drive slowly. I didn’t understand how a slow-moving too-tall truck would be less-damaging to the canopy than a fast-moving one, but then I understood when we reached a point where two enormous ancient live oaks pinched in with their trunks right on the white line. Good job Florida on not chopping them down to make the road wider!

The satellite view of the South Amelia River showed the secondary bridge to the right, which looked like it would be perfect for bikes, but the heatmaps revealed no cyclists used it for some reason. On the scene I learned it’s because it’s fenced off (structural issues?), but also it’s completely unnecessary since the main bridge includes this wide shoulder anyway.

We pulled over into a picnic area in Talbot Island State Park to eat our lunches. I don’t associate Florida with “forest”, so I wonder how far south the forests will continue?

Boneyard Beach at Talbot Island State Park, surprisingly inaccessible because an eroded 20-foot bluff separated us from the water.

After lunch we decided to try the bike trail paralleling the road, even though the road was fine and the trail’s winding would add a bit of distance. But it was totally worth it, some great jungle-forest riding where we didn’t even need to think about passing cars.

We’ve been seeing waters of the Atlantic Coast for months, but certainly none that have felt as “Florida” as this, with the white sands and palm trees as we cross the Fort George River.

Up until now, the many waterways slicing into the land have all been defeated by bridges, but apparently the St. John’s River is too mighty to be spanned. Thankfully there is a ferry, and as part of the Jacksonville public transit system, it costs only $1 apiece for us with our bikes. It seemed that the (quite-new in places) off-street bike trail terminated here, indicating that the ferry is considered a part of the holistic bike route along the coast.

A five-minute ferry crossing of the St. Johns River, maybe the final ferry of our ferry-filled East Coast ride?

Pelicans posing at the ferry dock came in for close-ups as the boat slid past.

Yes, this pelican is most certainly judging you.

Pelican showing off his expanding mouth.

About a mile from the campground, Rett needed to stop as her energy had dropped off a cliff and her limbs became twitchy. This isn’t a terribly-unusual condition for her, and usually consuming some sugar and getting a bit of a rest resolves it. That solution remained effective today, except during the break she went from sweaty-overheated to clammy-cold, a new (potentially hormonal?) twist that we’ll need to keep an eye on.

Hanna Park is a Jacksonville City Park (actual Jacksonville is far to the west, but it has a border extension that surrounds this small bit of coast), and there was a manned gated entry over a mile from the campground entrance. Thankfully they efficiently processed the check-in to our (reserved) campsite right there, and we could just proceed straight to our site. The campground was far more crowded and packed together than our previous secluded spot in Georgia, including a lot of families with kids on this Sunday night, maybe taking the entire Thankgiving week off? The bathrooms/showers were pretty cruddy (including the drunk woman who talked Rett’s ear off), but the jungle-forest setting was still pretty great. And even the “tent-only” site we’d chosen has not just electric, and water, but also a sewer connection?! Florida!

Our campsite (#86) at Hanna Park Campground.

Comments

2 responses to “Kingsland, GA to Jacksonville, FL”

Joel

November 30, 2024

Line 2 is the platonic ideal of gov’t funded lib trolling. At the very least it triggers an eye roll, groan, or in this instance 2 cases of digital ink spilling. Well done!

1. neil
  
  November 30, 2024
  
  Ah, thank you, that’s the perfect explanation for what that line makes me feel but couldn’t quite crystallize. And I honestly must tip my cap; given our collective inability to resist, that’s some God-level trolling, makes me think that guy has better political skills than his presidential campaign revealed.