The weekend after Hurricane Ian we tried to go to Lake Louisa State Park but the park was closed. The gates going in and out were broken and the motors were pulled out of the foundation. There's no way the hurricane could have done that. It looked more like someone rammed the gates, both of them.
A couple weeks after the hurricane I decided to take a bike ride all by myself around the park and do some exploring. I was warned by the guy working there that a lot of the trails around the creek are flooded. The week before I did a 17 mile bike ride around Clermont. This time I only did 13 miles but it was much harder, so hard my back was killing me the next day.
The trails would go from hard compact sand to sand so loose I'd have to peddle like crazy to get through it and a couple times I even had to get off the bike and walk. In three places the trails were flooded and I had to turn around. The last time I had to turn around I was really annoyed because it was a couple miles back and the sand was really bad on that trail.
A couple weeks later we had Hurricane Nicole which made the flooding even worse. I haven't been back to see how much worse but I know from biking at the Crooked River Preserve a couple miles upstream the water has gone up a lot since then and it will likely be at least a month before it goes back down to normal levels.
