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This is what I was prepared to post today after we arrived in Live Oak, Florida and got all set up:

Have you missed us?  We didn't make it out of Clermont, FL on Monday after all.

Sunday morning Denny and I went out to breakfast as is our habit and while doing some shopping afterwards we both smelled diesel fuel.  Denny looked under the truck and sure enough, we could see fuel dripping. 

Here we go again.

Not wanting to drive to the next campground leaking fuel, I called the Ford dealership at 7AM on Monday, leaving a message that we once again needed to bring in the truck and hoping that something they had done last week was causing the problem.  In the meantime, we had to get out of our current campground because our 2 weeks were up and membership rules state we have to be out of the park for seven days before we can make another reservation.  So I'm calling other campground nearby trying to find a place that's relatively inexpensive (and Clerbrooke RV Park?  $48 a night is not inexpensive) that would also allow us in early so we could drop off the trailer and get the truck to the Ford dealer as early as possible.  Many back and forth phone calls later, I have a spot for us, we're hitched up and off we go, about 20 miles north of our current location.  We unhitch, open up the slide outs, toss the cat into the trailer and off we go to the Ford dealer to leave the truck and rent a car, again.

Mr. Optimist has decided not to put up the Internet satellite dish thinking we'd get the truck back in the afternoon because the problem would be that the repairman had simply not tightened something in our earlier repair.  Ha.  Mrs. Realistic says it's never that easy.  Guess who was right?

This time it was bad o-rings and valves in the area of the fuel filter holder with horrendous labor charges making this repair and car rental over $800.  So in one week we've dropped close to $3200 at the Ford dealership.  Wintering in Florida has been very expensive for us.

This morning we'll be heading up to Live Oak, FL which is where we started our Florida adventures.  I didn't enjoy a lot of it because I had that stomach/flu thing going at the time, so I'm hoping the remaining few days of our reservation there will be relaxing and free of problems.  I think we deserve that.

Okay.  So here's what really happened this morning (Wednesday).  We hitched up, drove 20 miles up the road, felt the truck hesitate slightly and then watched in horror as we saw black smoke belching from our exhaust pipe and the truck's engine lost power.  I got on the phone with the  Ford dealer who has had our truck more than we have the past week and he said to bring it back (naturally).  Well, we weren't about to haul the trailer back to the campground where we had just spent the two previous nights because the road traffic noise was appalling, so we continued to Wildwood, Florida where we knew the campground was nice, with sizeable pull through camp sites.  They were able to give us a discounted site and as soon as we unhitched, opened the slide outs and threw the cat into the trailer we headed back down the road to Clermont to try this again.

Several hours later there was a message on our voice mail--"call me as soon as possible".  No estimate of price or work to be done, just "call me".  That was scary in itself.  Bad news--another $5000 worth of repairs.  Now while we had been arranging to have the truck looked at to see what was wrong this time, we wandered over to the new truck sales section to see if we could find any brochures on the towing capacities of the new Ford F350 trucks to see if one could handle towing our rather heavy trailer.  Not according to the salesman we spoke with, who showed us the official Ford tow capacity guides for the 2008 year models.  So we would have to stay with the F450.  And they just happened to have one on the lot.  Understand, back in 2000 when we bought out Ford F450, it had to be specially redesigned to make it into a pickup truck as they come off the factory line as a cab and rails only.  Now Ford makes them as a pickup themselves and they come with brake trailers and special engine modifications that allow for engine braking on hills and larger transmission coolers, yada yada which only means something to those of us who tow large trailers.  But, it is a sexy truck indeed and the engine is so much quieter than our 7.3 liter diesel and the dang thing turns on a dime instead of taking a city block to do so.  But it's a lot of money.  Then again, we would have to invest more money into an eight year old truck with no guarantees that something else won't go wrong 100 miles up the road.  Decisions, decisions.

We're working on it.  Stay tuned.