Crystal River is a great day trip! If you are in Florida and have a day to spare take a drive there and spend your day with manatees and beautiful scenery.
We need day trips every now and then. Saving for travel doesn’t mean that we don’t constantly have a travel bug.
So we travel around Florida and find all of the must see spots! We ventured west to Crystal River home of thousands of manatees in search of warmth during the cooler months. Crystal River has been on the list of things to do for a while now and we finally had some time to go.
Crystal River is kind of in the middle of nowhere. Our GPS took us to the middle of a neighborhood, obviously not right, so we found their cute little visitor center and figured out where to go.
Now you need a boat or paddleboard to get out to the manatees, there are several spots to rent either options, we went to Bird’s Underwater. Great little rental spot with a super friendly staff! They also do scuba lessons there! Crystal River is a great scuba spot; you can swim along side the beautiful gentle giants, we were told there are also some caverns.
So once we got our little kayak and our map we ventured out into open water to find some manatees. Unfortunately we should have called before because the water temperatures have been off this year so there weren’t as many manatees as usual. We still had a great time of course!
The gentleman told us it would take us about 30 minutes to get to Three Sisters Spring, which is the best spot for manatees and has perfect clarity throughout the water! He underestimated us a little because we kayaked for 30 minutes and got about a mile or two off track! So we backtracked and found where we were supposed to be.
And boy was it worth it!
We will definitely be going back for manatee season.
So, the fun part… After all that kayaking we decided we needed some seafood. So of course we asked the shop worker. He said “hands down the BEST seafood is at the mall…” He said to just trust him and if we want really good seafood go to Seafood Cellar and Café. So we drive to said mall and we think surely we are being pranked. This mall has literally no signs on the outside, except for K-Mart, half of the entries are closed and there are maybe 10 cars in the whole parking lot. This must be some kind of prank locals pull on people. Now we look up the online reviews because we have to know if this place is real. This place got a five star review?!
At this point we have to try it. So we find an entry that’s open, the one next to K-Mart, and wander into this seemingly abandoned mall. We meander into the food court… which is empty. Just as we are about to lose hope we go around the food court and there it is. We stood at the door for a while staring at the empty restaurant and at each other, well we made it this far so we have to eat now.
It was DELICIOUS! So glad we found this place. I would recommend some food but they say their menu changed all the time because everything is fresh. The habanero redfish dip was to die for! And they had New England clam chowder, which is my absolute favorite. The restaurant has a Cajun spin so we had to try some traditional Cajun food as our entrées; spicy shrimp po boy and some alligator jambalaya.
So travel tip for the day: always trust a locals recommendation, even if it scares you a little!
