Happy New Year

    Well here we are at the end of another year. We keep saying where did the time go? We keep hearing this from all our friends.  It’s true time seems to be speeding by. It seems like just yesterday we were putting up a 2015 calendar, now it’s time for a new 2016 calendar. Already we have many dates filled in with events, doctor appointments, RV rallies, and planned RV trips. Events planned all the way to September.  

    We had a few bumps in the start of the year, and throughout 2015, but things are smoothing out. As we close the book on 2015 we can look back and say wow, we did all that. Hopefully 2016 will be a lot smoother. We are very optimistic; the cup is half full, not half empty. And so we start 2016 with many planes. And so we are wishing you all a

               Happy New Year and may all your planes be fulfilled

Stretched Volkswagen bus

Stretched Volkswagen bus. Saw this VW bus in Cocoa Beach. Don't know were it disappeared to. . We went back at a later date to get a few more photo's, but it was gone.  We just got this passing shot.

November Blog, a month late, long, but mostly photos.

Well here I am procrastinating again. We are near the end of December and I am just trying to update November. November was a busy month for us, This is a long blog, but mostly pictures.  Starting with our Carriage Club Rally the first week of the month. It was a busy week with a tour of Kennedy Space Center, a Eco river tour and a day at Port Canaveral with a tour of the Explorer Tower, plus several dinners and pot lucks. It was a very busy week.  

This is the explorer Tower

View from the observation deck 

 

Cruise ship, one of two that were in port the day we were there

 Can you see the rainbow?

This guy was one of many osprey we saw on the boat tour

 

Next was the christening of my new boat 

See that spot in the water, that's a gator, he or she came to check out the boat.

If you can measure the distance from their eyes to the tip of their nose, every inch equals a foot. So this guy is pretty long.

 

 

The Bass Pro shop in Palm Bay. I really enjoy the décor of their stores. This is some swap buggy. Take your time looking at the buggy and check out the details. So many things on it. Sorry we couldn't get it closer.

 

A big Harley Davison store near Daytona Beach. When our son Mark was here visiting he just had to stop on our way to ST Augustine.  This is only about one forth of the store. There is also a second floor.

 

This is more my style.

 

In the parking lot was this neat truck.

 

 

We have a  strange flower. See how big it is, but it smells like garbage. Its been blooming for over a month.

 

His eyes were bigger than his month. We watch him for about ten minutes and he could not swallow the fish

 

Linda was watching "The Chew" and  saw this "popcorn cake". Well she had to try it. It wasn't bad.

The cake was made of popcorn

 

 

Another stop while our son Mark and his wife Tracey were here was a trip to Downtown Disney, Now Disney Springs. I especially enjoyed the boats, at the boat house restaurant and bar.

A lot of construction being done. It is expected to be done by spring.

Do you remember these?  You can go for a ride, with a driver. I believe the price was $75 for an adult, not sure about chidren.

Just one of the many boats. See some of the other boats in the background.

 

 

I guess that's enough boats.

There is a lot more to Disney Springs then boats, like this Lego dinosaur

 

Mark and Tracey

 

 

 

And finally the cabinets above the drivers compartment in our RV are finished, well almost.
Before

After, still needs several finish coats of  clear, and a few door nobs installed. The cabinets were build by a master cabinets maker. They match the rest of the cabinets in the RV

 

 

I’m sure I forgot something. We did post about Thanksgiving in an earlier blog.
Here we are near the end of another year. Time is running  by spinning out of control. At our age we must make the most out of every day.  So everybody out there embrace every day, because before you know it, you will be saying, “where did the year go”

Thanks for following along.

Wishing you a early Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Thanksgiving then and now

     I intended to write about our busy November at the end of the month, but here we are in December.  First I’ll talk about our super Thanksgiving. What made it great was our son Mark and his wife Tracey were here to spend it with us. Linda cook a turkey with all the fixing’s.  Joining also was my cousin Jane and her husband Nick, who live in the same community. Linda made the comment she can’t remember the  last time she cook a thanksgiving dinner.  So we started thinking about that and decided to look back from when we started full time Rving. We really had to rack our brains. We’ll start with 2005.  Here we go;

2005 with new Escapees friends in Livingston Texas, the headquarters of the Escapees

2006 Johnson Creek RV Park in Ingram/Kerrville Texas one of our favorite parks

2007 The home of a Christine a Disney worker, with about 30 other couple from Disney

2008 a repeat of 2007

2009 At one of the nicest  Escapees Parks, Jojoba Hills in Aguanga California

2010 At Thousand Trails in Clermont/Orlando Florida with many friends

2011 On the Beach in St. Augustine

2012 Again at Thousand Trails in Clermont/Orlando

2013 Out to dinner with my cousin Jane and her husband Nick

2014 A last minute dinner with neighbors. We just planned on staying home and relaxing after a very   stressful time in PA and a tiring trip back home. After  a phone call and then a visit from them, we joined them with about 10 other friends.  

2015 Linda comes through with a super Thanksgiving dinner.

 

Doesn't that like wonderful. Sorry for the glare on the corner of the photo.

 

I hope to find time to recap the rest of our November

Back home in Florida, blogging and face book

    Hi all, sorry for the delay in posting. Thank you for all the kind post. We are back in Florida without any problems. At least I 95 was open for the trip home. This was a trip just to get from point A to B without any touring stops. It was cold in PA, with a low one night of 34. We are not use to that cold weather.  Linda just wanted to get home, and with pending doctor appointments we just wanted to get there.  

     We are just getting ready for a RV Rally. The RV Park is about a mile from our home so we will just be going over each day in our car. I’m sure that will make us miss that lifestyle and grease our feet to start traveling soon. The RV is sitting and ready to go. We do keep it in hurricane mood. We can hop in and be ready to hit the road in a hour if we have to. Just need to empty one refrig to the other. Gas, propane and water full, waste tanks empty.

    We are making some far off planes to do some traveling, just a few small trips not far from home to meet up with friends that winter (snow birds) in our area. We do remember being snow birds, but now call Florida home. Boy that is hard to get use to. Hopefully we will become summer birds (is that what people from the south escaping the hot weather are called).

     Another topic- Face book. Several friends asked us why we don’t use face book instead of a blog. Well, we started with a blog to let family and friends know where we were and follow along with our journey.  Then it became a little bigger than we expected. We are around 600 post with 120, 000 hits and don’t want to stop posting and let those followers down. But with limited travel we are kinda letting our blog slow down.  Also how do we transfer all those blog post to face book along with the photos. Blogging does take a lot of time, but when we were traveling full time I enjoyed writing and posting photos, as it was the journal of our life, and we do look back at it. This is important; we still do want to travel. There are things we want to see and things we want to revisit. It’s no different than folks going on vacation ever year to the same place, be a cabin in the woods or a place at the beach, except our front and back yard change with each move. There is so much in this beautiful country of ours to see, we need a couple of lifetimes to see it all, and then will probably miss something as we may have been there at the wrong time of the year or the wrong season. So you see, we have the disease called wonderlust, only cured by more travel.  It is not only the travel, but also planning of the journey, although we do wonder off our planned path quite a bit.  We don’t want to spend too much time in one place. That is why we traded our 5^th wheel into something smaller, like the class c we purchased.  Big enough for the two of us and easier to get around in and pick up and go.  We also enjoy   being in the same vehicle, not like Linda following me driving our HHR. Speaking of the HHR, here is something you won’t see to often.

 

     A few seconds earlier it was 77 degrees making it 7 7’s, but it changed to 78 before I could find a spot to pull off the road  and take a photo, darn it!  We waited  hoping it would go back to 77 degrees, but it went to 78, then 79, what luck.

     We were just commenting on how many full time friends like us have either bought a home base or gave up traveling altogether. Must be the age bracket. We do have some tentative planes for 2016.  We miss making new friendships and finding new things to eat.

This scared the heck out of me, it happened while I was pulling around the gas pump, though I hit something.  The rear wheels are off the ground.

 

 

  THANK YOU TO ALL WHO HAVE BEEN FOLLOWING ALONG.  

Emergecy trip to Pennsylvain

    Hi, just a update. Linda's brother Tom passed away on Sunday the 4th. It was a shock to us as he was doing so well and Linda just spoke to him on her birthday. We decided to take our RV to PA  as we knew we had to be there in the Lancaster area for some time and the RV was the best choice. But what a trip it was going to PA. All told we had a little over 200 miles in detours because of flooding in North Carolina. The detour was on some lousy roads. Another slight delay was caused by a tractor trailer breaking in half, and another hauling a half of a park model home with a tire that was smoking and flying apart making us back off so as not to be hit with flying pieces till he could find a place to pull off the road.

    But we made it to PA to take care of details. We had a beautiful service on Saturday the 10th with pleasant weather. Not sure on what day we will be back to our home.  The only high point of the trip was  seeing our children, and  paying a  $1.93 for gas in SC & VA... We saw some beautiful fall colors which we haven't seen in a few years, guess we do miss north more than we thought.

     We had planned to do a month trip close to home for the month of October . No planes just get away. We scheduled no doctor appointments or anything else. Funny how things work out. 

Kathryn Abbey Hanna Campground Jacksonville FL 4-2015

Kathryn Abbey Hanna

A Jacksonville city park. It is a multi use park with a very large campground. The cost of a nights stay with our senior discount came to $31.25. It is a good place to stay for visiting Jacksonville and the area, and being on the beach. I say being on the beach, but from our site it was a one mile drive. The campgound  is about a mile from the check in station.   Because of the narrow roads with tight turns and a lot of  vegetation it is best to unhook your car, if in a motor home and finding your site and the best way to it. Many of the narrow roads are two way and could pose a problem if meeting a large rig coming from the opposite direction.  All the roads are paved.  There are some pull thru sites. The sites are mostly sand. About 290  sites. Many of the sites have vegetation between them.  We had a full hook up site with 50amp electric. The sewer hookup is odd in that it is a side hookup rather then from the top, and you will need a screw in connector. There are cross country bike trails and playground equipment.  We received quit a few over the air TV stations.  It is quite during the week, but very busy on weekends.  The beach is 5 to 6 miles long and uncrowned.  We drove to the beach as it is to far to walk carrying chairs etc. There is a lot of area to walk  a dog.  All this being said it is A GREAT PLACE TO STAY FOR THE BEACH AND  VISITING THE JACKSONVILLE AREA, and at a reasonable price.  Yes we would stay here again. I believe there was a $5. reservation fee

Our site, backed up to the woods, the perimeter sites are better. We were also at the end of a road on a turn.

 

Looking  one way and then(see  next photo)

the other

Looking back into our site

The very odd seer hookup, from the side, you need a screw in tight fitting connection.

The empty beach

one of a bout 6 or 7 boardwalks that cross the sand dunes

The sand dunes

Just chilling out.