Hike Bike Paddle Camp Florida with authors Sandra Friend and John Keatley as your guides
Florida parks with picnic tables and picnic pavilions. Great places to plan a picnic with the family. Pavilions usually must be reserved in advance.
A community park in Welaka, 40 Acre Park is a great stop for birding, with little-used trails that ramble around a series of wetlands once used in the fish hatchery.
Paved trails wind through the woods at A.D. Barnes Park, a Miami city park, where a tiny slice of native pine rocklands survives in one corner along with large trees.
Along busy US 19 in Tarpon Springs, hugs the western shore of Lake Tarpon, offering plenty of picnic pavilions along a boardwalk following the cypress-lined shore.
One of the few saving graces of former phosphate mines is that they provide awesome air for mountain bikers in Florida, and Alafia River State Park is one of the rare places where you can launch on a Florida downhill.
An easy loop at Alderman’s Ford Park, the Nature Trail slips behind the nature center for a walk in under ancient trees along the river’s floodplain corridor
Surrounding one of Florida’s most picturesque first magnitude springs, Alexander Springs Recreation Area provides visitors with many options to enjoy the spring and the woodlands around the spring basin.
Alfred A. Ring Park features a dense slope forest along Hogtown Creek with old-growth trees and rare wildflowers along Appalachian-style ravines, a scenic hike.
In late winter, azaleas create ribbons of bright color beneath the live oak canopy across the grounds of Maclay Gardens, a series of formal gardens along the hillsides sweeping down to Lake Hall.
Part of Charlotte Harbor Preserve State Park, Alligator Creek has two loop trails where freshwater and saltwater habitats meet, enabling you to explore a variety of coastal habitats in less than three miles.
In the city once called Alligator, first home of the University of Florida and named for a great chief of the Seminoles, Alligator Lake has long been a gathering place. Established as a park in 2002, hiking and bicycling are now its primary focus.
At Amberjack Environmental Park, a surprising collision of scrub and mangrove habitats occurs in Rotunda in the Cape Haze peninsula of Charlotte County.
For most visitors, the Anhinga Trail is their first glimpse into Everglades National Park. It’s short, and the alligators are right there: hard to miss.
