Wednesday, February 10, 2016
We are at John Prince Park Campground in Palm Beach
County, Florida. This is my view as I
type this post.
These ducks just floated past.
We spent 2 nights at Trail Lakes Campground in the
Everglades. We enjoyed lunch in
Everglades City, sitting out on a covered deck watching airboat tours come and
go.
And Steve enjoying a milkshake.
Then we were going to spend 2 nights at Long Pine Key
Campground in the Everglades National Park before heading for the Keys. They don’t take reservations at Long Pine
Key, but since there are no utilities at your site, they rarely fill up. We’ve stayed there on our two other trips to
the Everglades and had our choice of spots.
However, this time they were full.
We could have gone on to the Flamingo campground, but it’s an hour
further into the park and usually sites with utilities are booked up. So after some hunting on the Internet and a
few telephone calls, we found a spot in Florida City for two nights. It had a laundry and was close to both a
Walmart and a Sonny’s BBQ place.
It’s always hard to tell the nature of the RV parks
before hand. We check reviews on line
and don’t go any place not fairly well rated.
But you still don’t know what you are going to get. The vegetation at this place was a little
overrun, but it had been raining a lot lately.
The parking spots were grass, which can be nice, with cement pads for
the picnic tables at each site.
Sometimes you get the reverse.
I’m usually behind the wheel when we park, as Steve gives
much better directions and I’ve trained myself to do what he tells me (when
parking). So he went in to register at
the park and I got in the driver’s seat.
As we got closer to our site, he got out to direct me. We passed a group enjoying some beverages and
I was cheered for driving. “You go
girl!” and “Way to go!” were heard! I
suspect alcohol was involved. I’ve
gotten several compliments lately for driving and backing up. But backing up is usually a two-person job
and you have to find the combination that works for you.
When I first started reading RV blogs and comments on
forums, there were a number of comments about two ladies who were traveling
together. If they had to back into a
site, they walked around the campground until they found someone who would do
it for them! I haven’t read about them
lately, so either they are no longer traveling, or have figured out how to
park.
But we got backed in, although we had to use our 4-wheel
drive due to the ruts in the grass/mud from previous occupants. The park turned out to be a friendly one,
with a few long-term, year-round residents, a number of seasonal residents, and
a fair number of transients, like us. With
10 washers and dryers, getting the laundry done worked out well and we were
able to get stocked up at Walmart.
The night before we were to leave and head for the Keys,
a big storm came through. It rained hard
all night with lots of wind. We happened
to be parked under a tree with some kind of berries that squished when you stepped
on them. But they had a hard enough
shell that it sounded like acorns hitting our roof all night. Steve of course had taken out his hearing
aids and slept like a baby.
The next morning the wind was still strong. Strong enough that Steve was a bit worried
about being on the 7-mile bridge with the trailer. Since I hadn’t slept much, I was all for
staying another night if we could. Steve
checked, we could stay, so I went back to bed.
I think all the berries had been blown off the tree by that point.
So we were one day late heading for the Florida Keys, but
it was a good decision. There wasn’t
much wind and we had blue skies.
This is what much of the drive along the Keys looked
like:
Sometimes you could see the ocean, which seemed to have
several colors. It was hard to capture
in a photo, but maybe you can see it here.
Most of the time, the view was more like this.
Or just like driving through a small beach town, with
lots of souvenir shops.
For much of the way, there was a second bridge
paralleling the road bridge.
Frequently, these had been made into fishing bridges, but
not always. I suspect these are the
previous bridge and the supports might be used again when the current bridge
needs replaced.
Camping spaces are notoriously hard to come by on the
Keys and since we hadn’t booked 6 months out, I wasn’t sure what our RV park
would be like. We were pleasantly
surprised. While we didn’t have an ocean
view, it was a nice wide site, and a pull thru (drive in/drive out) with no
backing up required. The weather made it
even nicer. After we got parked, we
walked over to the pool side café and had lunch.
The pool:
The café:
The resort also has dock space for your boat! It’s not a luxury resort; no spa and not
manicured, landscape sites, but seems very nice. It was also about the most expensive park
we’ve stayed in, but we expected that on the Keys.
And while it’s expensive on a nightly basis, it’s not bad
on a yearly basis. The yearly rent for
an internal site is just over $11,000, utilities included. (Ocean sites are about $20,000). Which is why many of the sites have had
improvements.
This site had a large class A motor home, a thatched roof
deck almost as large and a paver patio.
If they don’t stay here all year, I bet they still rent it year round.
The Keys don’t all have beaches. The shores look more like a lake shore or
have mangrove trees with their roots in the water. There is a small beach at the resort, but for
a good beach, you’d need to drive to the state park about 5 miles away.
Walking is a common sport among RVers. Early morning is the preferred time and
you’ll see lots of people out walking.
But any time of day you’ll find walkers and especially dog walkers, out
and about.
This is already long and I haven’t yet talked about Key
West. I think I’ll close now and try and
get a Key West post done tomorrow.
Deb
