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.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

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.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

Fulltime RVers always say that their plans are written in Jell-O, and that’s a good thing, because it gives us the flexibility to go with the flow. Even when the flow is taking us where we don’t want to go!

I have bad news, and good news, and more bad news to share with you. The first bad news is that we have had a change of plans and had to cut our Florida visit short. The good news is that we have received a deposit on our MCI bus conversion and soon it will have a brand new owner. The second bad news is that we have to meet him December 4^th in Elkhart, Indiana. Yes, Indiana in December! Can you say cold?

So yesterday we were out of bed at the ungodly hour of 7:30 a.m. and started preparing to leave The Great Outdoors in Titusville, Florida. I wanted to be on the road by 9 a.m., but we were low on propane, and nobody was going to be available at the resort’s propane station until 9. Okay, how long can it take to get propane? We’d be on the road by 9:15 at the latest. Yeah, right?

I unhooked our utilities while Miss Terry stowed things away inside the motorhome, plugged in our PressurePro tire monitoring system, and started to scan our tires when an alert started beeping, telling me that our right outside dual was low on air. How low, you ask? It was down to eighteen pounds pressure! That’s not a good thing!

Our Winnebago diesel motorhome has an onboard air compressor, and came with a coiled plastic air hose to fill tires and such. I had never used it, but I drug it out of one of our storage bays, only to discover that it was kinked and cracked in three or four places. Totally useless.

The Great Outdoors has its own RV service facility, Eagles Pride, which is conveniently located next door to the propane station. It was a short drive, and I knew I could get there okay with the second tire on that dual side carrying the weight. After taking on propane, which took longer than expected, I walked over to Eagles Pride and asked if they could air up the tire and take a look at it. They said no problem, pull it up in front of one of their service bays.

That’s when I discovered that I had locked the motorhome door and left the keys inside! This day was rapidly going downhill. Fortunately (for me, at least), I had left the sliding window open next to the driver’s seat. I boosted Miss Terry up, she slid the screen out of the way, and crawled inside to open the door.

Ever the optimist, I was hoping that I had burned up all my bad karma, and maybe the flat tire was because I had not screwed on the PressurePro sensor cap correctly and had accidentally allowed the air to seep  out.

No such luck, the tech at Eagles Pride found a bolt stuck in the tread of the tire. They are not set up to repair tires, so they recommended a shop in Cocoa, about twelve miles away. With the tire aired up, we drove to the shop and it took an hour or so for them to take off the tire, remove the bolt and make the repair.

Finally, we hit the road, and rolled north on Interstate 95. We pulled into the Flying J in Saint Augustine for fuel, and since it was almost 2 p.m., had a late lunch. We were back on the road by 2:30, continued north to Interstate 10, and turned west. We were so far behind schedule that I had given up any hope of putting too many miles behind us this driving day. But traffic was light and we scooted right along, making good time.

We don’t like to drive at night, but we pushed it as far as we could, and just as the last light was fading from the sky we pulled into the Flying J at Midway, Florida, just west of Tallahassee. They have several designated RV parking spaces in their parking lot, and we slid in between two other motorhomes and settled in for the night. Including our detour south to Cocoa to get the tire fixed, we had covered 330 miles, which was a good day of driving after all.

Today we’ll have an easy run of 225 miles to the Escapees Rainbow Plantation RV Park in Summerdale, Alabama. We plan to stay there until after Thanksgiving, and then we’ll have a straight shot north up Interstate 65 all the way to Indiana.

That’s assuming, of course, that there are no other last minute changes of plans or problems to get us sidetracked.

Thought For The Day – Plant yourself in good soil if you want to bloom.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

In Saturday’s blog, I mentioned that I had never seen an alligator in the wild. Always ready to offer suggestions and ideas, a lot of readers either posted comments or sent e-mails giving me tips on places where I could expect to find an alligator.

Several of you recommended the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, just a couple of miles from downtown Titusville. It turned out to be the perfect place to cross seeing an alligator off of my bucket list. Located next to the John F. Kennedy Space Center, the wildlife refuge covers 140,000 acres, providing habitat for more than 1,500 species of plants and animals.

Yesterday, Tim and Ann Moran took us on a driving tour of the Refuge. Our first stop was the Visitor Center, where I got my National Park Passport stamped, and we checked out the exhibits on the Refuge and the area’s flora and fauna. I told a nice lady on duty in the Visitor Center that I was on a mission to see an alligator, and she gave us a map and some tips of places where we could expect to see plenty of alligators.

Her first suggestion was the Black Point Wildlife Drive, a seven mile loop that winds past wetlands, and includes a viewing area and restrooms. We had only driven a half mile or so before I spotted my first alligator in the wild, a small fellow maybe four feet long, lounging in the water of a shallow canal. I was thrilled, and we all piled out of Tim’s Jeep Cherokee and started snapping pictures. Very cool!

However, that was apparently the only alligator anywhere on the loop drive. We saw lots of birds, from egrets to herons, and plenty of fish jumping out of the water, but no more gators.

From there, we drove down Kennedy Parkway, a paved two lane road that ended at the Space Center. My friend from the Visitor Center said it was another good place to spot alligators, but we didn’t see any in spite of carefully scanning the banks of the channels and ponds as we drove by. I was disappointed, but what the heck, my goal was to see an alligator in the wild, and I had accomplished that, so it was a good day.

The final place the lady had marked on my map was the Bio Lab Road, a narrow six mile long dirt road sandwiched between the wide Intercoastal Waterway and a series of canals and brackish ponds. The south end of the road, where we turned onto it, was close to Playalinda Beach, one of a handful of beaches in Florida that allows nude sunbathing. Miss Terry shot me a look that let me know that was one thing I would not be scratching off my bucket list anytime soon!

We hit the jackpot on Bio Lab Road. Ann quickly spotted a large gator sunning itself on the bank of a canal, and again we all piled out of the Jeep to take pictures. Only a couple of hundred feet down the road, Terry saw the next alligator, another impressive specimen.

For the entire length of the road, we saw one alligator after another, either sunning themselves on the bank, swimming in the water, or submerged, with just their heads out of the water.

The alligators seemed to pretty much ignore us, and we were glad we had the canals between the alligators and us, though most of the canals were only a few feet wide, and I know gators can move pretty fast when they want to.

We were very careful to watch on both sides of the road, so that nothing slipped up behind us while we were looking the other way. Matted down areas in the grass showed us where the giant reptiles traveled. At one point Tim and Terry had climbed back into his Jeep, but Ann and I were still snapping away with our cameras when we heard a very loud splash in the water right behind us. We both jerked our heads around, then locked eyes, and made it back to the Jeep in record time!

So now I have seen an alligator in the wild. In fact, I have seen a lot of alligators in the wild. We lost count somewhere around ten of the creatures, but I’d say we saw at least fifteen, maybe twenty. And of course, as anyone who has spent much time in the outdoors will tell you, for every wild animal you see, there are plenty more that saw you and just kept still until you passed by.

Okay, scratch that one off the bucket list. Now where was that nude beach again? Anybody got some suntan lotion?

While I was off chasing alligators, Bad Nick was home writing a new Bad Nick Blog titled Stepping Up To The Plate. Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – Experience is the result of a non-fatal mistake.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally

I’ve been traveling America’s highways and byways all of my life, first as a little kid riding in the back seat of my Dad’s old Hudson, as we moved from one place to another or made our annual pilgrimage back to Ohio to visit family.

Later on, as a teenager I remember hitchhiking through several states, back in the days when hitchhiking was a safe and even accepted mode of travel. As a young soldier without any money, I “rode my thumb” across dozens of states to get to wherever I wanted to go.

Over the years I have traveled from coast to coast and border to border, on and in everything from motorcycles to automobiles, and now in a motorhome. There’s a reason I named our publication the Gypsy Journal; I know if I had been born 200 years ago, I’d have been a pioneer coming through the Cumberland Gap, in search of whatever lay over the next hill and across the next valley.

So I’ve covered a lot of miles in my time, and I’ve seen a lot of tourist traps along the way. You know what I mean, those hokey places offering “Real Indian Jewelry” and the opportunity to see “Live Rattlesnakes” or, in the case of the famous Wall Drug in South Dakota, just “Free Ice Water.”

Who knew you could build a business recognized around the world by giving away water? The folks at Wall Drug knew, and they did it! I don’t think you can drive any highway west of the Mississippi and north of Oklahoma and not see a sign for Wall Drug.

I have a love-hate relationship with tourist traps. I know that whatever they’re advertising to draw me in is probably not nearly as good as they promise, but who can drive past The Thing in southern Arizona, or the Jack Rabbit Trading Post up on Route 66 in the northern part of the state and not want to stop?

For those of you who have always wondered, but never stopped, the Thing is a mummified Indian found in a cave somewhere in the Southwest. But for the low admission price, you also get to see some other oddball things, including strange sculptures, and a Rolls Royce that supposedly once belonged to Adolf Hitler.

Of course, roadside tourist traps are not just a Western phenomenon. There are plenty to explore in the eastern half of the country, from the massive South of the Border on Interstate 95 in Dillon, South Carolina, where you can find trinkets and trash, along with some decent food and even a South of the Border theme park called Pedroland. How politically un-correct is that? I love it!

Just down the road from us here in Titusville, Florida is another famous tourist trap, called Jungle Adventures, which boasts the World’s Largest Alligator. As it turns out, that would be Swampy, a 200 foot long alligator shaped building that houses the ticket counter and gift shop. Not exactly what I wanted to see if I’m expecting the real world’s largest alligator. Still, Swampy’s toothy grin was quite inviting. I’d hate to have to pay his orthodontist bill!

Thought For The Day – Everyone thinks his own goose is a swan.

Register Now For Our Arizona Gypsy Gathering Rally