Falling Waters State Park, Chipley, Florida

We left our house to begin our adventure shortly after 9am.

We left behind our house without power, the tree debris stacked high and hoped to have a small amount of normalcy in taking our first “long RV trip” with our 2024 Bushwhacker Plus camper.

After asking questions of our friends that have done this before, I had planned out a trip for us to take and our departure date was October 15^th, less than 1 week since Hurricane Milton came through our area and caused a lot of damage.  Our friends said, don’t plan to drive more than 350 miles a day – you’ll be driving slower and you’ll want to set up camp in the daylight.  I tried hard to stay within those boundaries to see how we did with our first trip.

Our first stop was at Falling Waters State Park located in Chipley, Florida.  It’s west of Tallahassee which is probably the biggest town that many may have heard of.   This park is located 355 miles from our house.

We arrived around 5pm with enough time to set up camp, walk the dogs and eat before dark fell.

As I write this upon returning home, I realize just how much we have done since this first night of camping!

Campsite #15 at Falling Waters State Park

We were pleasantly surprised to see how lovely our campsite was.  Things we liked:

1. Lots of beautiful trees to provide shade
2. The site was gravel
3. Water and electrical hookup
4. Picnic table
5. A friendly campsite neighbor
6. Bathhouse close by – clean and functional

Our kids - Ollie (red harness), Abby (teal harness), Rue (blue/black harness)

Overall a great first experience as this was the 1^st of many stops on our journey.  I found that these are the ‘normal’ things that I expect at a Florida state park.  I have not found that they have wifi at the state parks, and many do not have a dump connection at the campsite but rather have a dump station (and with our little camper, either is actually fine for us).

In the morning, we decided to take the dogs hiking.  There is a trail that starts in the campground just a few sites from where we were staying and the dogs were definitely ready to go!  The fall is not an active time for the swimming area that the park provides and on this cool morning (it was 41 degrees), there was no one else out yet on the trails or the swimming area.

I try to always take a photograph of the trails just in case we get messed up and are 'off trail'.  There were some flowers blooming at this time of year.

Our first look at the lake.  During the summer, I am sure that there are a lot of people swimming here, but today it's just peaceful!

There are lots of very tall, slender pine trees here at this park.  I have to say that I looked at trees a lot differently after seeing the destruction from Hurricane Milton at home.  They were gently swaying in the wind as we walked along the trail.

The bridge that takes you over to the lake side.

Jim took the dogs across a portion of the bridge and then told them to run back to me - can you see the pure joy in their hearts of freedom and having fun?  I am sure, just like us, they have been stressed by the last month of hurricane prep, hurricane storm, hurricane cleanup (twice!).

Like I said, lots of pine trees!!!

Apparently we didn't take the proper trail to get down to the bottom of this platform.  We took the way that we thought, but ended up with a 'road block' on the boardwalk.  This is what you'll see if you do this.  

A platform that you can't get to!  On our way out, I asked the ranger if you could get down to the bottom and he said yes.  That you have 2 choices.

1) You can park in the day use area and it's a very short walk to the waterfall (perhaps 10 minutes) and it is all paved

2) If we had taken the upper level trail when we got to the day use area near the lake we would have hooked up with the trail that would take us down to the waterfall.

As luck would have it, I asked Jim if we could go to the day use area and walk down to the waterfall - so we did even though it was putting us a little later on our plans for the rest of the day.

That's the waterfall!  At this time of year, it's just a little water falling over into the sinkhole.  This isn't a typical waterfall since this water does indeed fall down but it's into a sinkhole.  This is the highest waterfall in Florida - 73 feet.  The sign at this site says that over thousands of years, water containing a weak, natural acid seeped through cracks in the soft limestone.  Below the surface the rock dissolved, forming underground cavities.  Eventually the roof collapsed, and this sinkhole was created.

We are all packed up now and about ready to take off for our next stop!  Stay tuned to see the next blog post soon!  For additional photographs from this camping site, click Photographs from Falling Waters State Park.