We drove away from the Rainbow River and headed into a deeper, darker, crowd free area of Florida that only the true adventurous and fearless dare to explore: The Withlacoochee River. Huge cypress trees, some hundreds of years old, stood as sentinels of time over the black river, boughs bowing over to blot out the sun, their knobby knees protruding along the banks and telltale watermarks tattooed across their trunks, signs that the river often rises high, flooding the banks to create one big dark swamp.