Miss Terry was still feeling pretty yucky yesterday, so we stayed home and didn’t do a whole lot of anything. I wrote a couple of articles for the next issue of the Gypsy Journal, answered a few e-mails, and called a subscriber who also wants to tow a Ford Explorer behind his motorhome, and was having the same problem locating a neutral tow switch. Since his part number is the same as the one for our Explorer, I think he can do the same bypass with an LED light, and make it work.

Sunday, after we got to Bushnell, I noticed that one of the kayak rack mounts we had attached to the roof rack of the Explorer had shifted. So yesterday I tightened all four of them up as much as possible. These racks are not going to be a permanent solution, and we’d like to replace them with Thule Hullavator kayak racks. The Thule racks are pretty spendy, but they will make the job of loading the kayaks much easier.

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The folks who live next to the Escapees campground have several donkeys, and the RVers who stay here like to feed them carrots and apples. Anytime someone walks up to the fence, the critters come running up looking for goodies.

They are friendly animals that seem to love attention. We spent quite a bit of time petting them.

This little guy was a bit shy, and mama kept him from getting up close to the fence.

We also saw this turtle crawling along, and took its picture. The donkeys were curious about this strange animal, but they all seemed to coexist pretty well.

A while back this feral hog wandered onto the property and has settled in with the donkeys. Feral hogs are a growing problem throughout the south, and all the way to south Texas.

The donkeys don’t seem to mind the squatter amid their  presence, and they pretty much ignore him. The hog, on the other hand, must be lonely, because he was looking for love in all the wrong places. Several times while we were standing at the fence, he tried to mount one or another of the donkeys, without much success. I don’t know, maybe he should have found a barnyard with Shetland ponies in it instead. Who knew we could find live piggy porn right here at the Escapees RV park!

At 4 p.m. I went over to Social Hour at the activity center, and said hello to some folks. Terry still wasn’t feeling well, so she stayed home and worked on proofing a new book I want to get in print soon. As I was walking to the activity center, I spotted a converted Prevost bus that looked familiar, so I knocked on the door. Sure enough, it was Ron Walker, a fellow we knew from our bus nut days that we have not seen in several years. That’s one of the neat things about the fulltime RV lifestyle – we never know when or where we are going to run into somebody we met someplace else at another time in our travels!

If Terry is feeling any better today, we may go shopping for different kayak racks. Or, we may just stay put so she can rest up some more.  I’ll know what we decided by this time tomorrow.

Bad Nick took advantage of the day to post a new Bad Nick Blog titled How About Some Common Sense? Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – You cannot be lonely if you like the person you are alone with.

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Yesterday was a long short drive for us.

We pulled out of the Orlando Thousand Trails preserve about 11 a.m., me driving the motorhome and Miss Terry, the Explorer. We drove north 11 miles on U.S. Highway 27 to State Route 50, then took it west through Clermont, Groveland, and Masconte.

Traffic was light, and we moved right along. When I planned our route on Microsoft Streets & Trips, I thought that it said it was going to be a short drive of about 40 miles, but it sure seemed to take a long time!

We very seldom travel in separate vehicles, and I don’t like it very much. But since we don’t have the base plate on the Explorer yet, we didn’t have any choice. I like Miss Terry’s company a lot better than my own!

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I kept wondering when we’d get to Interstate 75, and since the GPS was in the Explorer, I didn’t have any point of reference. But eventually we reached to the interstate, and took it north eight miles, then took County Road 673 east a couple of miles to the Escapees Sumter Oaks campground. I don’t know how I figured the mileage wrong, but it was actually 55 miles from our campsite at the Thousand Trails to our site at Sumter Oaks. That sure was a long short drive!

We got the typical warm Escapees welcome, with hugs. Well, at least I got a hug. Miss Terry is fighting a nasty cold, and kept her distance so she wouldn’t make anybody else sick.  We were assigned site #11, a full hookup 50 amp campsite we’ve been in on previous visits here.

The campground is not full, but there are quite a few RVs here. Most of the sites have full hookups, but they also have a small boondocking area across from our site, where this nice Airstream trailer is dry camping.

Sumter Oaks is a nice campground, with lots of beautiful old live oak trees, draped with Spanish moss. There are usually some sand hill cranes wandering around, but we haven’t seen them so far. Once Terry gets to feeling better, we’ll have a better look around.

We’ll be here a week, then head back to the Orlando Thousand Trails. Under our membership, we can stay at any Thousand Trails preserve for up to fourteen days, and then we have to go to another campground, even another Thousand Trails/NACO preserve, for at least a week before we can return to the same campground.

Usually we don’t go back to the same campground that soon, but the nice folks at Camper Connection, just a couple of miles away, have ordered a Blue Ox base plate for us, and we have an appointment to have it installed December 1st.

Once that’s done, we want to head down to Fort Lauderdale for a visit with Jim and Chris Guld, from Geeks on Tour, and then get down to Key West for a week or so.

I have some nephews and a niece in the Saint Petersburg area that I have not seen in about 25 years that I want to visit with, and that’s only about 70 miles from here. So, depending on how Miss Terry is feeling, we may pop in on them while we’re here, or else we’ll wait until after we come back from Key West. I’m looking forward to reconnecting after such a long time.

Thought For The Day – A friend is the one who comes in when the whole world has gone out.

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Yesterday was a short travel day for us. In fact, one of the shortest we’ve had in a very long time.

We enjoyed our time at The Great Outdoors in Titusville, Florida, and I took a photo of our Winnebago in Peter and Connie Bradish”s lot before I started unhooking our campground utilities in preparation for leaving.

This is a very upscale RV resort, where you can buy your own very nicely groomed lot, and enjoy every amenity you could imagine.

The resort has several small lakes, and I’m told the fishing in them is good, but I never got the opportunity to check that out.

The resort even has its own church! As you can see, most of the homeowners drive their golf carts everywhere, even to church!

We left The Great Outdoors just after 10 a.m., traveled south to the next exit on Interstate 95, and took State Route 407 a short distance until it merged with State Toll Route 528, which took us west around the south side of the Orlando metropolitan area to Interstate 4. We traveled just a mile or two south on Interstate 4, exited onto U.S. Highway 192, then took it west a few miles to U.S. Highway 27, where we turned north a couple of miles to the Orlando Thousand Trails preserve. Peter Bradish had given us the directions, and they were perfect. 

Well, the directions Peter gave us were perfect. The directions we got from our GPS were not so perfect. We had entered the address of the Thousand Trails into our GPS, so we wouldn’t miss the turn into it, because somebody had told me that a condominium complex next door hid the sign until you were right on top of it. According to the GPS, we had over a mile to go, when I noticed the Thousand Trails sign, which was indeed hard to see. By then it was too late to make the turn.

U.S. 27 through here is a wide six lane divided highway, with designated left turn lanes. We drove a couple of miles, looking for a place to turn around, but I wasn’t sure that we could make a U-turn with the van in tow. I finally pulled into a left turn lane, and decided it would be too tight to make the U-turn, and the last thing I wanted to do was be jackknifed across three lanes of busy U.S. highway, even on a Sunday morning. There was a divided driveway leading into a housing subdivision on the far side of the road, and I told Terry I was going to pull into the subdivision instead, and we’d unhook the van from the tow bar and get pointed back in the right direction.

It wasn’t until we had pulled into the driveway that we discovered that it was a gated community. So there we were, with a locked gate in front of us, two cars that had pulled in behind us, and no place to turn around. Can you say “oh crap?”

Fortunately, the fellow in the first car gave us the gate code, we punched it in, and the gates swung open. I pulled in, parked along the curb, we unhooked the van, and got the heck out of there. A GPS is a handy tool, but never trust one completely.

We had never stayed at this Thousand Trails before, but I have to say that we’re impressed. The 255 acre campground has 850 full hookup RV sites, a swimming pool, activity center, and a 60 acre spring fed lake. The property also backs up to Lake Hancock, a large lake that is supposed to be home to some massive trophy bass.

We choose a site on a corner at the end of a road, with some trees on one side of us, a pasture behind us, and the sites next to us and across the street are empty. Gee, no neighbors. Maybe I’ll just run around in my BVDs. No, Miss Terry says maybe I won’t.

A sky writer was posting this message for us when we got into our RV site. Isn’t that nice? I love you too.

Even with the unexpected detour caused by the GPS, we drove exactly 70 miles, and I was in the office at the Thousand Trails registering by noon. That’s a short travel day!

Once we were parked and hooked up, we drove down to the campground’s boat launch at Lake Hancock, to check things out. It was windy and chilly, but the weather is supposed to improve by mid-week, and getting out on the water is a priority for us. Our kayaks haven’t been wet in over a year, and we need to correct that.

I bet some whopper bass live in these lily pads!

The lake isn’t home to just big bass. I don’t think I’ll be dangling my toes in the water!

Terry and I walked out on the floating dock, and we heard a loud thumping sound and a big splash of water in this little lagoon. Then several fish jumped. We didn’t see the gator, but we knew he was there.

We’re looking forward to doing some relaxing here, getting some paddling in, and I may just buy me a fishing rod and a license, and see if I can tempt one of those big bass to bite!

Thought For The Day – A bargain is something you can’t use, at a price you can’t resist.

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We’re leaving The Great Outdoors in Titusville, Florida today and are going to the Orlando Thousand Trails preserve, which is actually in Clermont. We owe a big thank you to our friends Peter and Connie Bradish for hosting us on their lot here for the last few days. We really appreciate your hospitality, dear friends.

We’ve had a nice time during our visit, and look forward to coming back here again one of these days. There is so much to see and do in this area that we could keep busy all winter long fishing, kayaking, touring the local attractions, and sampling the fare at the many area restaurants.

Though we sometimes find ourselves spending as much as two months in one place, especially when we visit our family in Arizona, we usually stay no more than a week or two in one location before we move on. Much longer than that, and I get bored and hitch itch sets in.

One complaint I hear frequently from fulltiming women is that their husbands are always in “go mode” and never want to slow down. I’m guilty of that myself all too often.

Sometimes Miss Terry has the need to settle in for a while, so she can do some serious cooking, get a shopping fix in, and just decompress. I think a lot of RVing couples are like us; the husband wants to be on the go all the time, and the wife needs to slow him down so her needs are met, too. It’s important to recognize each others’ needs, and to be willing to compromise so those needs get met. 

Once, while we were teaching at Life on Wheels, a wife told me that they never spent two nights in the same place. She said they drove over 500 miles, nonstop, to visit her sister in Maine. She said they arrived at 6 p.m., parked in the driveway, had dinner with her sister and her family, and at 7 a.m. the next morning they pulled out, because the husband was ready to go someplace else and see something new.

Another husband once bragged to us that they had been on the road for over a year, and had not spent one night in an RV park. It was always truck stops, WalMart parking lots, and roadside rest areas. He was having a ball and bragging about how much money he was saving. One look at his wife and you could see that she was miserable. Her idea of retirement was not seeing the world through a windshield, and living at Camp WalMart. I haven’t heard from either couple in a long time, but I wonder how long those relationships lasted in the fulltime RV lifestyle?

Of course, the flip side of the coin are the wives that “can’t be away from my grandbabies,” and insist that their travels never be too far away from wherever those young ones are. One fellow told us that he has always wanted to see Arizona, but never will, because his wife insists that they return to Illinois every few weeks, even in the winter, so she can see their grandchildren and keep track of what was happening in their adult daughters’ lives.

We have met more than one fulltiming woman who reluctantly gave in to their husbands’ desire to travel, but were damn sure going to make him pay a price for it. Nether the husband or wife was having a good time, and it was obvious in every case that they probably wouldn’t be on the road very long.

I’ve toyed with the idea of having a panel discussion at one of our rallies on Staying Married (And Happy) In An RV. What do you think?   

Thought For The Day – People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.

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It started raining late Wednesday night, and it rained hard most of the night here in Titusville. By morning the rain was really coming down, and NASA postponed the space shuttle launch again. Now they are aiming for this afternoon.

The many delays may be frustrating for those who are waiting to see the space shuttle blast off, but the local merchants sure appreciate it. The stores and restaurants are all very busy.

I used to do a lot of fishing, but it’s been years since I dipped a line in the water, except for one outing a couple of years ago with our friends Wes and Jan Chilson on their boat in Aransas Pass, Texas. Lately I’ve been wanting to get back into the sport.

With yesterday’s launch canceled, we visited a couple of shops so I could look at fishing equipment. The stuff I had years ago was getting beat up in the bus bays, and never getting used, so I finally gave it to my son-in-law. I’ve been away from fishing so long that I need to reeducate myself on what kind of gear I need.

I’m pretty much a catch and release angler, because I like catching fish a lot more than I like eating fish. I don’t plan on doing any deep sea fishing, so I don’t need super heavy duty stuff, and I don’t want to spend a lot of money, because I’m cheap. I’m leaning toward a Shakespeare Ugly Stick rod and spinning reel combo I saw at WalMart. My friend Al Hesselbart from the RV Hall of Fame Museum in Elkhart is a dedicated angler who’d rather fish than eat, so I called him for his suggestions, and Al thought the Ugly Stick was a good choice for my needs.

After looking at fishing gear at a couple of places, we stopped in at a little used book store in town, because we can never pass up a book store. But, the owner was closing early because she had to get to an appointment, so we only stayed a few minutes. We’ll have to go back on another trip to this area.

It was still raining, and obviously wasn’t going to clear up anytime soon, so we decided to have an early dinner and then head back to the motorhome. Somebody had suggested Valentino’s, an Italian restaurant in the shopping mall on U.S. Highway 1 (Washington Street). The place wasn’t fancy, but Terry and I agreed that it was absolutely the best pizza we have had in more years than we can remember.  The service was fast and friendly, and our total bill for bread knots, a medium pizza, and drinks, was $20. You can’t beat a bargain like that!

The weather is supposed to clear today, and we’re scheduled to have lunch with our friends, and hosts here, Peter and Connie Bradish. If we get done in time, we’ll run back to the riverfront and try to find a parking place among the crowds. NASA says the shuttle launch is back on schedule for 3:03 this afternoon, and I really hope we get to see it this time! It’s one more thing to cross off my bucket list.

Thought For The Day – It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.

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