Thursday, March 17, 2016

We are at Tanglewood Park in Clemmons, Forsyth County, North Carolina, just outside of Winston-Salem.  Steve’s nephew, Bryan, and his wife, Katie, live here and recommended the park when we visited 3 years ago.  It’s a great county park that offers walking and biking trails, horseback riding, golf, swimming, playgrounds and a dog park.  It’s a well used park.

Oh, and it has an RV campground.  This is my view:

I last wrote from Beverly Beach, where we had an ocean view. We had dinner there with Steve’s sister Nancy and her husband, Graham. They are building their retirement home near there and happened to be in town to talk to the builder. 

Steve tore me away from my beautiful view March 2, but the wildlife gave us a good show before we left.  There was a group of 7 pelicans that we had watched over the course of our visit and they did a fly over that morning.  We also saw more dolphins and even a few whales (or at least their spouts).  But soon we were on the road and headed for River’s Edge Campground on Tybee Island, Georgia, near Savannah.  A fellow camper had suggested this campground, so off we went.  We were now officially headed north for home, with a stop at my dad’s in New Bern, NC, along the way.

As we headed for Georgia, the scenery changed to coastal marshes.  The coasts of Georgia and South Carolina are home to more than 100 islands, the most famous of which is probably Hilton Head.  But the coast is riddled with marshes that border the islands, rivers, and coast.  It’s not uncommon to have a mile long bridge that goes over a river that is flowing through marshland.  Some times home docks stretch 100 yards or more before reaching navigable water.  It was very hard to capture a picture that would depict this, but here’s my attempt.

The sea islands were originally settled by the Spanish who were driven south by the English and plantations established on many of them.  Sea island cotton was a luxury item.  With so many islands, the area was also a haven for pirates who could hide on the various waterways.

Near Tybee Island is Cockspur Island, where Fort Pulaski was established to protect shipping into and out of Savannah.  The fort was completed in 1847.  Robert E. Lee oversaw part of it’s building.  It was thought to be impenetrable except by large cannons, which couldn’t be brought close enough to the island to do damage.   The governor of Georgia occupied the fort at the very beginning of the Civil War, but abandoned nearby Tybee Island, allowing northern troops to establish a foothold on the Georgia coast.  They built batteries and brought in rifle-bored cannon, a relatively new invention, which were more accurate and had a longer range than previous cannons.  The walls of the fort were breached and the fort surrendered.  That brought shipping in Savannah to a halt for the duration of the war.

We had a wonderful interpreter telling us about the fort.  He was dressed in a Union Civil War uniform.

Tybee Island is a tourist destination and as a result has lots of restaurants.  We enjoyed several, including one we walked to for dinner one night and took this picture on our way home.

Our next stop was James Island County Park, outside Charleston, SC.  Two of Steve’s nieces, Jennifer and Meredith, live here and we had lunch with them.

We also managed to finally catch the SpaceX launch at nearby Folly Beach, NC.  The launch was due about dusk, and although we were several hundred miles away, Steve wanted to try and see it.  So we found a restaurant on the beach and went out on the pier after dinner and were lucky enough to see the vapor trail.  I don’t know if you can make it out in this picture.

Steve was happy.

Charleston has some unusual architecture.  The old houses are long and narrow and set perpendicular to the street.

The style developed to take advantage of the prevailing breezes and the porches are always on the South and/or West side of the houses to shade the house from the sun.  The porches and side yard were used as an extension of the house, so for privacy, there is a front door on the street that opens onto the porch.  The side yards were typically fenced.  Because of this, the north and east sides of the houses might have few windows, allowing more privacy for your neighbors.  “Charleston manners” dictated that you not notice anything out those windows.  There are a surprising number of these homes still standing.

I’d like to get this posted today, so I’ll sign off for now.  We will be home by Easter!

Deb

Monday, February 29, 2016

We are at Beverly Beach Camptown RV Resort in Flagler Beach, FL.  And this is my view.

I think the only time I’ll be moving from my chair is to take a walk and sleep.  This is awesome!  Lots of birds, people and dogs to watch!  

Pelicans for my dad:

And here are several that I’m not sure about, although I think they are gulls.

These have funny haircuts:

Our two weeks in Cocoa, Florida, were very relaxing.  This sign at our campground sums it up.

We visited with Joan and Pat, friends from our college days, and Joan’s friend, Bill.  One of Steve’s amateur radio buddies, John, was close by, so we visited him and his wife, Diane.

Steve also went to Kennedy Space Center.  Since I’ve been in the last 5 years, I really didn’t feel inclined to go.  But he went on two different days, visiting the Space Center and trying to catch a SpaceX launch.  Unfortunately, the launch still hasn’t gone, but he did get some pictures.  The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket vehicle is the vertical white pole on the right surrounded by four taller towers.  I like the rainbow.

He also took a picture of Snoopy, who helped publicize the space program.

And one of our favorite artifacts at the Space Center is this front page cartoon from the Indianapolis Star:

With the help of Tripadvisor, we also had some great meals, including one in a restaurant made out of two train cars.  Ben, in Chicago, we were thinking of you!

We drove over to Port Canaveral one day for lunch.  Lunch was great – bacon wrapped scallops for me and a shrimp Cuban sandwich for Steve.  There were several ships in port and we drove around trying to get a decent picture of the Disney ship.  That didn’t happen but the car from Ghostbusters was sitting outside a car museum.

We never know what we’ll see!  This morning, as we were watching birds dive for fish and people walk their dogs, a pod of dolphins swam by.  They were working their way north fairly rapidly and we barely caught a picture, but it was cool!

I’ll close with sunrise and sunset pictures.  And, yes, I’ve gotten up to see the sunrise two days in a row.

Sunset:

Deb

Thursday, February 18, 2016

We are in Cocoa, Florida (not Cocoa Beach!), east of Orlando and near Cape Kennedy.  We’ll be here for 2 weeks, enjoying nice weather and waiting for a satellite launch.

We spent the weekend in Orlando at a hamfest (amateur radio flea market, although they do have some seminars, etc.).  The drive from Orlando to Cocoa was typical interior Florida – untamed scrubby forests

and usually empty grazing fields.

The coasts of Florida are extremely crowded.  One city bleeds into another without breaks.  But not very far in from the coast you can find fields and undeveloped land.  Looking at the landscape and thinking back 50 years, it’s no wonder Walt Disney picked the middle of Florida for his theme park.

Our current location was chosen for it’s closeness to the Kennedy Space Center, but it’s been a pleasant park.  We don’t have a view, except of other trailers, but we seem to have a wifi booster on a pole right next to our back window.  We’ve had the best Internet service we’ve had in the trailer.  If we can’t have a view, we’ll take good Internet.

We’re taking it easy this week, working on some projects and sorting out stuff in the trailer.  Steve’s done some amateur radio work and I’m rearranging storage so that we can get Maria’s car seat out of the truck and stowed under the bed.

I didn’t get a chance to write about our trip to Key West.  We went on Super Bowl Sunday, hoping that might cut the crowds we’d heard about.  We also started early; we’ve learned that we can beat the crowds in most places by going early.  Key West was no exception.  Parking is limited and can be difficult to find, but we had little problem finding a spot near the Little White House.  We weren’t certain what we should see in our one day, but chose to do this first and we are glad we did.

Stepping out of the truck, we were greeted by chickens!  Apparently, they are a Key West icon.  This fellow seemed anxious to pose. 

President Harry Truman was the first President to use the Little White House, but it’s been used by several Presidents as well as other high-ranking government officials.  After his first 18 months in office, Truman was exhausted.  He had only been vice president for about 83 days before President Franklin Roosevelt died.  The war with Germany ended shortly after that, but the war with Japan was raging.  He made the decision to use the atom bomb to end the war and hopefully save millions of soldiers live. 

His doctor ordered rest and the Navy offered the facilities at Key West. The building that housed the commandant was available, it was secure and the weather was lovely.  Truman continued to visit throughout his presidency. 

The house was used by the Navy and others until 1974, when the Navy closed that part of the base.  A developer bought the unused part of the base and developed a gated residential community, signing the Little White House over to the state of Florida and helping in its restoration.  It’s still available for government use, as needed. 

We couldn’t take pictures inside the house and it was difficult to get a picture of the outside.

Strolling through the gated community around the Little White House was quite pleasant.  Trees shade the streets and the only pedestrian traffic is dog walkers and tourists headed for the Little White House.  The least expensive single family dwelling in the gated community is $1,150,000.  You can get a condo for under $600,000.  Without an ocean view. 

We had a nice lunch at a restaurant with an outside patio.

The weather was fine for me.  Steve wore his jacket, as there was a good breeze.  We watched the world go by.  And the conch train, which pulled tourists around town.

The bar on the second floor in the picture advertised itself as a clothing optional bar.  We did not check it out.

As we walked around town, we found the original Margaritaville Café.  We didn’t check out the café, but did hit the store next door, where Steve found a polo shirt!  White, of course.

After wandering around for a while, we called it a day and headed for home.  Before settling in for the Super Bowl, we went down to the dock to catch the sunset.

It was a nice ending to a good day.

Deb

Deb

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