Swampy’s
We really like going to Swampy’s when we stay at the End of the Rainbow. It’s not just the view and the easy walk, but it’s the personal history. When Heather was a teenager she used to babysit for the family that lived in the house that is now the now the kitchen and service area of the restaurant. This is long before Dunnellon was the hotspot on the map that it is today, and back then it wasn’t uncommon for an alligator to come up on the bank by the house. She’ll still point out, it was right over there where we saw that big one.
Fired-Up Saloon (Two Rivers Local Bar)
It’s always fun going to the Fired-Up Saloon (aka. Two Rivers Local Bar), which is just a couple blocks from the house. The bar has changed names and owners a dozen times over the years. But years and years ago when we were living overseas, we would come home to visit and we go there for dinner and drinks. There used to be a thing on the menu called the “Ernie Mills Special.” Erne Mills was a guy that Andy went to high school with, and Ernie went on to play in the NFL. The Ernie Mills Special was an enormous platter of deep-fried miscellaneous. There were gator bites, and chicken wings and breaded okra and on and on. Every time it was different, and every time we’d be like, let’s take a bite and see if we can figure out what this is.
Blue Gator
One of our family’s favorite places is the Blue Gator, the bar and restaurant down on the Withlacoochee river. It wasn’t always a restaurant, it used to just be a bait and tackle shop where you could rent boats. But even after they built up the restaurant they kept the bait shop and they used to sell live crickets. When the boys were little, Andy would take them in there and buy a box of crickets to take home. The boys would play with them in the back yard, letting the crickets crawl up their arms and all, and then we’d set them free (to be eaten by snakes and lizards instead of fish, but we didn’t dwell on that so much).
Check out some more pictures from around town below!
