Home Sweet Home

Kathleen, Erin & Bill on St. Patrick's Day

On April 22nd at 3:30 in the morning, Jeanne, Ali and Emily left our home in The Villages and headed to the airport.  We went back to bed.  However by 8:00 that morning we had packed up, strapped the bikes on to the back of our van, hooked up our camper and headed for home.

For the last number of years, Cathy has been a member of a team of people who have been assisting a 90 year old woman who has 

been dealing with memory issues.  She was recently hospitalized and that prompted us to leave Florida a little early.  

The ride home was mercifully uneventful.  The bikes made it back home unscathed and the camper has already been stored up north.  

We are settling back into the real world and are very grateful for our time away.  Thanks for following our little adventure.

Ken and Cathy 

Still in The Villages

Cathy and I are still in The Villages, Florida.  The Villages is a unique place.  It has no natural

wonders, no mountains, lakes or places of historical interest.  What it does have is near perfect weather, golf courses everywhere, pools everywhere, pickle-ball and tennis courts everywhere and I recently read that they celebrated having  their 3,000 organization/club.  

On April 1st Cathy and I moved from one rental house to another.  To get our bearings, we went for a ride.  We stopped at the closest Rec Center.  It has a pool, tennis and pickle ball courts, Bocce Ball courts and a number of meeting rooms.  We walked in and the person at the reception desk asked if we were there for the Portuguese class!  Cathy's sister and our nieces are visiting now and I was showing Emily one of the nearby rec centers.  We were invited into one of the meeting rooms where they were just finishing a pottery class. These are great examples of the spectrum of things that are

offered in The Villages.  It also offers many entertainment venues including three huge movie theaters and three "town squares" where there is free nightly entertainment and three various size theaters for plays and assorted music venues.  Golf here is free.  However if you take your golf cart on the course there is a $4 per person charge.  

We have gone to a number of open houses since we've been

here but we are truly not interested in buying.  However we are looking to rent someplace, for at least part of next year.  We play Pickleball almost every day and we go lap swimming 3-4 per week.  We golf some, bike a little, go to movies and we went to a polo match! 

If someone is looking for a beach community this isn't it.  But if you're looking for a place to live that offers a lot of recreational opportunities - you should consider The Villages.

We hope you enjoy this photos we've posted on the blog.  We took a ride to Cocoa Beach with Jeanne, Ali and Emily.  Cathy's uncle, Lloyd Kolb is down here with his daughter, Patti.  Before Bill Blaney left for home we went out to dinner with Bill and Karen Early.  Earlier today we went to the polo match.  

See you soon and happy Easter.

Village Fun with Guests

In recent days we have availed ourselves to some of the amenities that The Villages has to offer.  

We took a two hour class entitled Pickle Ball #101.  It was educational and fun.  While the scoring seems a little odd, eventually it makes sense.  We have also taken a golf lesson.  By the end of the one hour lesson Cathy was hitting the ball off the tee with her eyes closed!  We found it interesting that the driving range is on a lake.  With land here being so expensive, golfers hit the balls into the water.  The balls are corked and there is a slight left to right current.  Every night a company comes in and removes the thousands of balls that were hit, washes them and they're ready again the next day. There are buoys in the water so the golfer can judge their distance although we learned that it's pretty tough to get much of a roll.  We have only been on the course once but enjoyed it and plan on getting out again as soon as possible.  

On March 4th, Bill and I celebrated John's 65th birthday sending him this photo of a traditional birthday orange with a candle.  

We were happy that Mike and Mary ventured into The Villages for a

visit.  They got to see the place and see what it has to offer.  

Cathy's cousin, Debbie, also came for a visit.  During her stay we went to Sumter Landing and danced to the music of Rocky and the Rollers.  

Bill joined us the next day and we introduced Debbie to the

game of Pickle Ball which she seemed to enjoy.  We couldn't let Debbie go home without her laying around the pool, driving the

golf cart, going to church at St. Timothy and of course going grocery shopping at Publix.  

Just before she headed North we had lunch with Cathy and Debbie's uncle LLoyd and their cousin, Patti.  

           

A couple of days later Bill and I met our cousin, Kerry Blaney for lunch.  Kerry has been coming down here for a few years and was a wealth of information.

All in all things are going well in The Villages.

Now in The Villages

Since our last blog post we have transitioned from our small pop up camper to a very nice, very comfortable home in the Villages.  Our hosts/landlords had to return to Wisconsin unexpectedly early due to an illness of one of their family members  Their early departures coupled with their generosity allowed us to move in a full 10 days early at no additional charge.

People have asked what we do here.  First the weather is near perfect with daily high

temperatures in the mid 70s to mid 80s.  The weather has allowed us to spend some time at the many nearby pools.  There is nothing like the simple pleasure of diving into a sparkling pool of water with nothing but your swimsuit and wallet.  Nothing was destroyed except my pride.  

We spent a day going to thrift stores and flea markets to buy some used golf clubs.  I think all of us have stereotypes of the deep south and when you look for them, you see them.  The huge Marion Market was no exception.

As for the golfing we've already been to one of the driving ranges and I think golf

lessons are in our future.  

I've played just a very little bit of pickle ball with my brother, Bill and learned  there is more to it than I thought, so earlier today Cathy and I signed up for a pickle ball class to be held next Friday.   

We've gone to a couple of movies (discounted price with our Villages ID cards) and afterward walked around

one of the three public squares that offer free entertainment on a nightly basis.  While this photo is not good, it should show 100s of people "of a certain age" all line dancing to Up Town Funk.

Even trips to the nearby  grocery store are more fun when you're driving back and

forth in a golf cart  which are sometimes called "golf cars" down here.  

In short, We're Lovin' The Lifestyle.  

Pizza, Sea Oats and Kite surfing

It is an undisputed fact that campers are some of the nicest people in the world.  

It was certainly true of the old couple from Indiana who stood on the back bumper of our trailer so that I could lift the front of the trailer after it fell off the car.

It was even more true about Andi and Tom who camped next to us.   One night they

gave us a huge pizza that the pizza guy had delivered after making a mistake on their take-out order.  And it was true of a man named Dave who camped across the road from us.  Dave reached the age of senior citizen a few years back.  He came down from Rockford, Illinois by himself.  When we tried to give the extra pizza to him, he declined. However, earlier in the day he had met a woman who was camping with four little children and no other adult.  He brought us over to her and she was excited to accept the portion of the pizza that had no meat as she and the children were vegetarians.  None the less she took the meat side of the pizza for the kind people that were camping next to her.  

So, if you’re keeping track, the official count was one pizza and five  campsites. 

Campers are some of the nicest people in the world.
********************
Adapting and rolling with the punches is one of the keys to successful camping.  

Our next destination was to be Johnathan Dickinson State Campground in Hobe Sound.  Hobe Sound is on the Atlantic coast and is about 4 hours from where we are.  We’ve gotten some reports that the campground was damaged by some storms and that now shade was a scarcity.   

However our hosts/landlords of the house in The Villages are returning to Wisconsin unexpectedly early and said we could move into their house after they leave at no additional cost.  So our next adaption is extending our stay at Fort DeSoto before temporarily mothballing the camper and heading to the Villages. 

I wasn't sure what sea oats were so I picked everything and brought it all to the ranger station to be identified.   They laughed and laughed.

I decided to try kite surfing.  Here I am on my first attempt.

As I got better I went for a few jumps.

Some of my friends joined me after a while.

I wish any of this were true.  It looked fun but like my dream of playing profootball or swimming with the Henderson Swim team, I think that part of life may have passed me by.  

Fort DeSoto update

So, many of you have  been asking me why we haven’t blogged in a while.  Well, not so much “many” of you but some of you.  Ok, not really “some” of you.  But seriously, maybe someone was wondering about our blog.  Maybe not so much wondering out loud, verbally but maybe silently - like in their heart.   So here is what is going on southern Florida by way of photos.

On Saturday our friends, Rick and Sarah Noel,  who were vacationing in Clearwater, came  to visit and go out to lunch.  We had a great time and we appreciate the effort they made in coming to our campground.

We remembered last year that the ushers at St. John Vianney wore tuxedos.  They still do.  Maybe the idea is you’re less likely to give a tuxedo-dressed usher the leftover coins in your pocket.

After Mass we stopped at a farmers market and split a ham and cheese crepe.  

We also saw this tuxedo dressed man making and selling barbecued ribs.  Maybe he used to be an usher at St. John Vianney.  

Here’s one of the reasons we haven’t blogged in a while.  It’s so very easy to bike to the all but abandoned beach and get caught up in a book or the scenery.  This is a photo of Cathy.

I may have stayed too long at the beach.  You can see what type of sandals I wear as parts of my feet turned a very nice shade of red. 

We took a drive down to Sanibel Island to visit our friend, Marilyn Maglio.  After lunch, she was eager to show us her church.

Outside was some very cool statuary, including this bronze statue of Christ.  I took this photo off the St. Isabel Parish website.  Note how the bench was made for two, enabling the visitor to sit down and spend a moment or two with Christ.

In the back of the church hung a portrait of the area’s bishop, Frank Dewane, a Green Bay native.

We spent a night in Bradenton before venturing to Anna Maria Island to visit Mike and Mary along with their friends, Karen and Wayne Hollister.  From our campsite to their house is about 6 miles as the crow flies or about an hour by car.

Anytime we head south of St. Petersburg we cross the Bob Graham Skyway Bridge.  I took this photo off the internet.

Thanks for letting us share the last few days with you.

We're Camping

Bill & Duke

After our two nights in The Villages, we reluctantly bid farewell to Bill Blaney and the two dogs he cares for and set out for Fort DeSoto campground near St. Petersburg.

Now, you have to realize that when you set out on an adventure like this, some things go wrong but with the proper amount of planning and strategizing you can minimize these errors.  As an example, we made our camping reservations several months ago.  So on Monday we proudly pulled into the campground a full 14 minutes before “the google” said we were to arrive.  When we went into the ranger station to register, eager to start this leg of our adventure, we were told that our two week reservation did not begin until Tuesday!  Boy we laughed.  We laughed and laughed.  Cathy laughed so hard that when I looked over at her it looked liked she was about to

Our New Campsite

cry.  The ranger mercifully provided us with a campsite for the night – but today we took down our site and set it all up again, just 5 sites down the road.

The setup on Monday went amazingly well.  We were completely done in an hour!  This includes setting up the camper, unpacking the car, setting up the clam and stringing the tv antenna in a tree.  The time it took for Cathy to set up the inside of the camper was shorter than usual as we forgot to bring sheets for the bed.  Again, we laughed and laughed and laughed and headed into town for sheets.

Today At The Beach

We are now completely settled in our new home away from home for the next two weeks.  Life is good.