Pioneer Park Days

Across the highway from the Peace River Thousand Trails campground is Pioneer Park.  It's a county park in south central Florida.  We have wandered around this park on previous visits, enjoyed the wildlife refuge and the trail along the Peace River.  We had read of a festival held there each year but were always there too early or too late.  This year, luck was on our side and we were able to attend Pioneer Park Days during our stay.  We walked over on Tuesday night to have fair food for supper.  On the walk over we saw hundreds of turkey and black vultures flying in to roost in the trees along the river.

Unfortunately, we didn't find any food vendors open so we had dinner at a small diner across the street.  We walked back to the motorhome under a beautiful pink sky!

Saturday we drove back over to the park (needed to save our legs to walk around!). First we wandered around the flea market.  Not as much fun as it used to be - where in the motorhome can I put that?  Of course, we had to try the homemade ice cream!

Now that's an ice cream churn!  It makes 10 gallons at a time!

We found some barbeque for lunch and then waited for the afternoon Civil War Re-enactment.  We had see the encampment and watched a blacksmith earlier.

We had a nice conversation with a woman participating in the re-enactment.  We learned it is quite an expensive hobby!  We also had a chance to talk to her husband, a retired firefighter.  There were only about 20 at this re-enactment, but some are much bigger - as many as 1500 actors!  Now that would be a sight to see!  Actually, one that big was held in northern Florida earlier and friends invited us to join them, but it would have required an overnight stay and we didn't want to break camp at that time. 

Since it was a small "battle" there wasn't a lot of action, so Glenn and I started trying catch a picture of the cannon just as it fired.  We're glad for digital cameras because we took a huge number of pictures trying to get the shot!  Glenn had the best one! 

In the top picture of the cannon, you can see the fire of the charge just as it's leaving the barrel!

I'm sure if we are near another re-enactment, Glenn will be wanting to go!