Our first 6 weeks in our "winter" state of Florida have flown by. After returning from our sailboat trip, we spent 10 days at an RV park in the Seminole Tribe lands south of Clewiston. This is the most remote park we've ever been at -- the grocery store was a 40-minute drive away! However, the other RVers at this park were wonderful and friendly, having almost daily 4pm "social hours". Basically, you just grab your chair and a drink and go hunting for whatever site it is at that day. 20-25 folks all show up within 10 minutes, gab for an hour, and go to their respective homes promptly at 5pm before the mosquitoes start swarming around. We also saw lots of alligators and water birds of all types. While we were away on our trip the park also had wild bear and panther sightings (sorry we missed those!).
We then began our annual "tour of Florida state parks" at one of our favorites, Jonathan Dickinson. It is well positioned to family and friends we have both north and south of its Hobe Sound location, plus we got to reconnect with two RV couples we had met previously and formed fast friendships -- keeping track of each other as we all move around during the year. It is fun catching up on "where have you been, where are you going, what have you seen, what have you fixed etc. etc"!
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| The Martins and the Marlins at the Kennel Club |
From there we moved across the state to Myakka River State Park near Sarasota. It was our first time here and is a cool park full of lots of trails, wildlife, and fun activities to do. This location was also near several close Gator friends, family in St. Petersburg, and the annual Tampa RV Supershow. We managed to fit it all in as well as washing our window awnings, replacing some RV roof antennae, and reorganizing our "basement" storage areas to fit a new ladder that we bought at the show. To Jeffrey's dismay, I want to do some annual RV roof edge maintenance myself instead of continuing to pay others. We didn't have a ladder that would safely get me 13 feet "up" -- but we do now! Not many girls can say their Valentine's Day present is a "Little Giant" ladder :-) We'll get our first chance to use it next month when we try to replace our new slide topper awnings ourselves.
Speaking of the RV show, this one is one of the biggest in the country with over 1000 RVs on display and several hundred vendors selling all types of supplies and services. It is a great place to have our Blue Ox hitch serviced (what we tow the car with), purchase any RV supplies we need, and peek at the new RV models. We are happy to report that we haven't seen anything yet that tempts us away from Max. We still find him a great fit for our traveling and living needs.
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| Two happy campers! |
Like most of the country, we've had some unexpected nasty weather both on the west and east coast of this state, most notably tornadoes that thankfully missed us -- sweeping just north or south of us while we were in the Myakka park. As typical, these things happen in the middle of the night, forcing us to get up and dressed at 3am and prepped to run to the concrete-block bath house nearby. Did you know that, even when in airplane mode, your cell phone will receive the severe weather alerts? Why was I in airplane mode? Because the cell service was so bad in this park that my battery would burn down quickly overnight trying desperately to hold onto a too-distant cell tower :-/ Anyhow, we lived through the rainiest January on record in Florida! Hopefully February will be dryer!
Maren & Jeffrey
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