A new day 

Oh, This is Better!

Ah, it's nice here on the coast! After six days of visiting our friends Tim and Penny in Okeechobee it was time to move on. Our choice for our next stop was St. Augustine and oh what a difference! Due to the wild fires in central and eastern Florida we chose to follow I-95 instead of driving back roads, figuring that fire fighters would work to keep the interstate open. We only had to detour off the highway once due to the fires and a hard downpour of rain probably helped out those hard-working firefighters.

Our current campground, located on A1A, is right across the street from the beach so I'm looking forward to walking over to catch the sunrise tomorrow morning. The lady at the office here says there's a sightseeing tour sailing ship that comes down the Intercoastal Waterway to the rear of the campground near sunset that makes for a good photo opportunity so we'll walk down there this evening to see if we can time it right to see the ship.

It's cooler here and less humid and there were no swarms of love bugs during our travels so we only have to clean off the grime left by the smoke and road dirt splashed up during the thunderstorms as we traveled. Life is good.

Lake Okeechobee

Lake Okeechobee in Florida is the second largest freshwater lake in the contiguous United States, the first largest being Lake Michigan. Fed by the Kissimmee River and rainfall, it is approximately 730 square miles in size and ranges in depth from about 9 feet to about 17 feet depending on rain conditions. Originally the waters of Lake Okeechobee flowed into the Everglades, but dikes and canals and channels were built for agricultural purposes which shut off that flow. In the 1920s a 35 foot tall dike was built around the entire lake after hurricanes in 1926 and 1928 breeched the dike and the resulting floods killed over 2500 people. Named after Herbert Hoover, the large earthern barrier has a wide trail known as the Lake Okeechobee Scenic Trail (LOST) which circles the lake and is approximately 110 miles long.

An annual Big O hike occurs each year in November and the participants claim to have spotted wild hogs, deer, bobcats, alligators, manatees and many types of birds while on the walk. There are many campgrounds of all types and sizes around the lake and you can fish in the lake or the channels surrounding the lake itself. The towns around the lake are small and friendly and the pace is slow.

Just don't come in May and September; that's when the love bugs are out in full force.

A Lazy Sunday on Mother's Day

Since our time has been spent with our friends this week I don't have any local pictures. They would all be obscured by love bugs, anyway.

So for this week's Lazy Sunday on Mother's Day we have "awwww" pictures of Patches. It was while taking these pictures that I discovered my much loved Konica DiMage Z2 camera has a very slow shutter speed for taking pictures of a rapidly moving kitten. So I deleted more pictures than I was able to save and even these are a little blurry around the edges. Since I'm normally taking pictures of scenery the shutter speed was never an issue. I guess I'll have to learn how to take film clips and transfer them to the computer and then onto blogger. Any experts out there?

Happy Mother's Day!

Darb sent me roses but he also sent a toy for Patches... 

Mom got flowers but I got this neat box! 

I have a toy box. 

A rare moment of stillness. 

A shoestring and a chair leg make a great toy. 

The big game hunter has a bird-of sorts. 

I love boxes. This is my kitty garage. 

All tuckered out. The End. 

Old Friends

Not so old, really. We worked with Tim and Penny until Penny was forced by management to retire due to the fact she lost the feeling in her legs and had to start using two canes to walk. The owner of the campground where we were employed felt she wasn't able to handle her duties properly and insisted she resign. So out of four couples, three sets of us resigned in protest. Long story. But we became good friends in the six short weeks we worked together and talk on the phone weekly or every other week. Good enough friends to drive nine hundred miles out of our way to surprise them for a visit, planned for a year. So that's where we've been the last two days as we have some catching up to do.

Tim decided to start his own pool cleaning business two weeks ago after Tim's boss told him that Tim's wages would now be paid in cash- no taxes taken out, etc. His boss also stopped carrying workman's comp, so something weird was going on and Tim knew it was time to get out. This is a scary time for Tim and Penny so we're providing a bit of distraction. We know Tim will do well as he's a hard worker and as honest as the day is long. But if any of you live in the Ft. Pierce/Port St. Lucie area of Florida, do I know a super pool man for you!

Tomorrow morning we have to start scraping love bugs off the front of the fifth wheel. To wash them off the front of the truck we had to scrub them with a Dobie pad, Mean Green and a high powered spray from the car wash. The little suckers get baked on in the sun and heat. Yuck.

We Picked the Wrong Time

To travel in Florida again. We haven't been this way since 2002 and we now discover we are in prime wildfire season. And we'll be traveling up the I-95 corridor in a week as we head to St. Augustine beach. Perhaps we didn't plan this one very well.

Add to that it is "love bug" season. Love bugs are lightning bug-type creatures that fly around mating in the air which then commit suicide on the grill of your vehicle and mass suicide on the front cap of your fifth wheel as you drive down the road. I certainly hope our next campground allows washing or at least partial washing of your vehicles-yuck. Bug gunk.

On the plus side, traffic is certainly lighter here compared to the winter months. One out of three ain't bad.

We're Gone!

Denny had had it with isolation, fecund vegetation and bugs. The area surrounding the Econfina State Park has these nasty triangular-shaped, camouflage colored flies that want to walk on your eyeballs and bite like a son-of-a-gun. We had tried a walk to the Econfina River to watch for manatees but were hounded by those pesky flies walking in both directions. We gave up walking while we were there. Since the nearest town was a 40 mile round trip we didn't drive to down as the price of diesel is too high and we're now paying for campgrounds in our travels. We are so spoiled out West traveling from member campground to member campground where we pay no campsite fees.

The upshot is we left the free campground early as we were marooned in our rig due to heat, humidity, bugs and isolation. So we left two days early. We are splitting the long drive to a day Okeechobee into two segments and we'll be surprising both our friends by arriving early although Tim has no idea we're coming at all and Penny thinks we're arriving on Thursday. What fun to just show up on their doorstep!

Patches continues to travel well, sleeping most of the way. Loud, large trucks do startle her but she settles down quickly. I think we done good. Safe travels all.

What I Did This Weekend

It was sunny, rainy, sunny, rainy, sunny....Thus it was a good weekend for the painstaking labor needed to create this: CRYSTAL CACHET


That occupied my mind so that I wouldn't worry about what might be wrong with the truck's transmission. This morning we made the long trip into town to discover it was problem solved with a $1.10 hose clamp (and $50+ in labor,etc.) but at least it wasn't major and theoretically it's fixed. Which is a good thing as the next leg of our journey is 330 miles, mostly on I-75 which is not a good place to break down. At least most of the snowbirds should be long gone so perhaps traffic won't be as horrible as it can be in January, February and March in Florida. Listen to me talk about snowbirds, right?

Time to entertain Patches for a while. We're learning that kittens are high maintenance. Sigh.

Really Out in the Boonies!

Man, you know you're out in the boonies when there are no geocaches in a 30 mile radius of your campground. That's a first for us. At the current prices of diesel fuel we can't justify driving miles and miles to play geocaching games when we're going to be traveling so much more this summer.

Today we have an appointment at the Ford dealer to see why we're leaking transmission fluid. Cross your fingers for a cheap and quick repair for us. More later.

A Lazy Sunday in May

It's a beautiful, muggy day here in Florida and we're too far from town to run out easily (and cheaply) to get a paper so we'll get our news online today to maintain our Lazy Sunday tradition.

My photos today were taken over a three day period beginning in Pahrump, Nevada and ending during our drive through Idaho en route to Washington. As you can see, the temperature changes where a bit dramatic. So we learned not to head north in early April-it's way too soon for spring up there. Actually, it did end up being nice in Washington so perhaps the snow storm we encountered in Idaho was a bit of a freak occurrence. Or not.

It took me twelve years to get a photograph of a road runner after seeing my first one in Phoenix in 1984. This one ran around our rig for a good 15 minutes and I got off several good shots. 

A road runner shows off for us in Pahrump, Nevada.