A Visit to Newton Park with Gail

In these times of Covid-19, we have to decide what we are comfortable doing when venturing out of the house and looking for entertainment.

It really depends on what you feel is right for you and your family. For my family, we have a young toddler, so I personally haven’t felt comfortable to go inside buildings with her yet.

Instead, we try to choose some outdoor places we can visit, and we try to do this a couple of times a week.

Newton Park

This week we decided to wander around Newton Park, in Winter Garden which is a lakefront park by Lake Apopka.

It wasn’t busy at all mid week, but I can see it being more popular on weekends for fishing and picnics.

Newton Park

In this park, you can even bring your own boat and go out onto the lake itself and do a little fishing.

Newton Park

We mainly love it because it’s so peaceful and the views are so pretty, on a clear day you can see pretty far.

The day we went, it was pretty cloudy so you couldn’t see too much but it helped that it was much cooler!

Newton Park

We walked right out onto the pier to take in some of the views since it was such a nice windy day.

Pro-tip, try not to drop any Goldfish snacks along the pier if you can help it, was a bit daunting like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds movie!

Newton Park

We even got to see some gators, they were a few baby-sized ones floating around and then we spotted this larger one right by the pier. Must have been a good 5-6 feet long!

Newton Park
Newton Park

Lake Apopka is the fourth largest lake in Florida, and during the 1940s was one of Central Florida’s main attractions.

Anglers traveled from through the world to fish here. The Edgewater Hotel in downtown Winter Garden used to house many of these visitors.

Newton Park
Newton Park

Sadly, the discharge of water, rich in nutrients from agricultural and other sources, produced conditions that created a chronic algal bloom and resulted in a loss of the lake’s recreational value and game fish populations.

In the ’90s, clean up measures with good intentions failed and muck choked the lake bottom.

This eventually led to other restoration projects, each with its own problems and work continues to develop a plan to ensure future development does not negatively impact the lake.

Newton Park

We continue to visit other parks in the area but wanted to talk about this one since its a lovely local place to visit.

Newton Park is located at 31 W Garden Ave, Winter Garden, FL, 34787.

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