Colt Creek State Park - Lakeland, FL

Visited 04/30/11-05/01/11

Your experience at this park will almost certainly be different from mine, as I spent the night here with my son's Boy Scout troop.     I still figured I'd be doing the world an injustice by not leaving a short blog, suggesting that you find a better campground.


We initially had a difficult time finding our site, as the road to the back of park (the only road to campsites) was blocked with plastic, orange barriers.    I'm not quite sure why you'd block the road when you know that dozens of cars will be coming that way all day, but perhaps there's a logic behind it that I just can't see.     So, after following the only other path until we ran out of road, realizing that we had seen exactly zero campsites, and turning around, we decided to be rebellious and move the barriers.     We made it about a mile down this road before coming across an employee sitting in an idling truck, seemingly waiting on us to come by.    I pulled up and advised him that we were with the Boy Scout troop, requesting to know if we were headed in the right direction.    He began by telling me "no, you're not headed in the right direction", before mumbling for 5 minutes about the state of the road we were driving on, and how they were planning on paving it at some point down the road (see what I did there?).    "I don't care, you strange fucker!", I yelled.   Okay, so I didn't yell anything.    I just nodded my head and said "mmm hmmm" a lot.     He finished by pointing down the road, in the direction we were headed before we were hijacked by his ramblings, and saying he would follow us.    I turned to head down the road and he cut me off, so that I was following him.     To this day, I don't understand why anyone would do that.    Was he trying to assert his power, like a high school bully?    I also don't understand why he initially told us we were headed the wrong way.   This was literally the only road to the campgrounds.     Following him back,  I could swear I heard banjos playing. 


We got to the campgrounds about another mile down the road, with no issue.     The campsite was actually fairly nice.    Like I said, this was a Boy Scout trip, so I'm not sure if this was the site you would (or could) get if you were to just call and request a campsite for your family.    It was a large plot of land with plenty of parking and no defined tent plots.     There were two fire pits, surrounded by benches, and one clean port-a-john.    I think this site may only be available for large groups.   We took a couple hikes down a fairly extensive trail system, which is pretty robust because of the equestrian-friendly park.    If you had a horse, this would be a decent park for you.   But really, who has a horse?    Besides, the scenery wasn't anything to write home about... or write a blog about.


All in all, the experience at the campground itself was decent.   There's a lot of open field for activities ("SO MUCH MORE ROOM FOR ACTIVITIES!"), plenty of firewood, and a damn fine light show at night with thousands of fireflies.   


(sorry for the lack of pictures.  I didn't take many on this trip)

The next day, however, was not so great.      We got up and packed our gear at about 9:00.    After breakfast, everyone decided to go down to the pond and do some fishing.     We made it through about an hour of catching next to nothing before Mr. Condradictory showed back up with his truck and his mumblings.     He explained to one of the troop leaders that it was apparently against the rules to park in the parking lot.   From what I understand, although there were 10-15 parking spots, we just had too many cars parked there (3 or 4).   We were asked to leave.   He was also not happy that some of the women and children had gone into a screen room near the water and turned on the ceiling fans to escape the sweltering heat.     If these facilities aren't for customers of the park, I'm not really sure why they exist.

If you come out here, don't bother bringing a boat.   There's nowhere worth putting in.     The pond had some fish in it but only one guy seemed to have any luck catching a couple bass.    That says more about everyone else's lack of fishing skills, though, than it says about the difficulty of fishing.     I was fishing with rubber worms and live nightcrawlers.    I'm not sure what he was fishing with. 



We brought our boats along and, with no place to put in, ended up driving about 20 minutes away to the Withalacoochee river and doing a bit of boating/fishing.

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- WEBSITE:  http://floridastateparks.org/coltcreek/default.cfm
- PRICE:  ??   (I have no idea.   It was all taken care of by the Boy Scouts)
- PRIVACY:  8/10 if you had a large group.    1/10 if you had to share the site.
- FISHING: 2/10 (for us)
- STAFF 2/10 (at least he left us alone at the campsite)