A Visit to The Villages

I have a bad habit.  When I put the trailer on to the car, I balance the hitch on the ball.  When I am done winding up the wheel, I bump the trailer and the hitch falls onto the ball with a small “clunk”.  The clunk gives me confidence that the two are solidly together.  However, if one were to forget the bump part of the process, the entire 1500 pound trailer will crash to the ground where nobody but Mr. Universe could lift it again.  In a related lesson we have learned that having three adult size people balance themselves on the back bumper of a camper makes such a lift do-able by a mere mortal.

We took a scheduled trip to The Villages to visit my brother, Bill.

The Villages is an enormous retirement community of about 150,000 senior citizens.  Bill is currently dog sitting for Bill and Karen Early in a beautiful home they just bought.  This is my third time to The Villages and I think The Villages are full of golf courses, pools, bike paths, golf carts (seemingly as many as cars), tennis courts, pickle ball courts and clubhouses.  It also seems to be, at least by this outside observer, to be culturally non-diverse and politically conservative.

We had a great time with Bill, enjoyed some bike riding, swimming and good meals.  We extended our visit by a night as heavy rains were pelting our campground. We look forward to a return to The Villages after our stay in St. Petersburg and again in March when the girls plan to join us.

Here is a photo of a wind surfer.  I took the photo last week but for some reason I was reminded of it yesterday as I tried to put up the clam in a wind storm!  Our new campsite is directly on the water and while it provides world class views, it fails to provide any protection when the winds are gusting.  Before we had a chance to tie down the canopy which hangs over the trailer door, a wind gust flipped the canvas and all 5 poles on to the top of the trailer!  Only Dorothy, Aunty Em and the people of Kansas can appreciate the experience.

Thanks for following us on this adventure.
Ken and Cathy

Fort DeSoto

Our time in Panama City Beach included visits with Don & Marilyn King (Jackson School) who showed us around the Sea Side area and Sylvia and Lou Nyberg (Egg Harbor) who came to visit us and go out to lunch.  Both were on very cold days but both visits warmed our hearts.

Marilyn King & Cathy
 

Since our last entry, we packed up and moved to St.

Ken, Cathy, Sylvia & Lou

Petersburg.  To be more exact, we are at Tierra Verde, Fort De Soto County Park.  The park is beautiful.  Our campsite is 40 yards from the water and the weather has been wonderful. 


We wandered out of the campground today to find the YMCA in St. Petersburg for a little lap swimming.  It is HUGE.  You can probably guess what a huge pool looks like at 11:00 a.m. when it’s located in the middle of a retirement area.  To paraphrase Bob Hope, “It made us feel so young, It made us feel there were songs to be sung…”.  I was once again lap swimming like I had before the speedo boys from Arkansas ruined my self image.

4:00 Shrimp & wine

Fort De Soto is another park recommended to us by my cousins. Thank You.  The park has super bike trails, miles of white sand beaches and beautiful vistas. 

Fort DeSoto beach

Camper at night

We’ll be driving up to The Villages this weekend to visit my brother, Bill before returning to this park on Sunday.  As it turns out weekends in beautiful parks are busy and there was no room at the inn for us. 

It's not home, it's Destin

Dear Friends and Family,

Before we left on this extended adventure we told many of you that if there comes a time when this is no longer fun, we’ll just come home.  We told each other that this trip should not become an episode of Survivor, where we are just “getting by” but are no longer enjoying ourselves.  Well, we were enjoying ourselves when the temperature was in the 60s & 70s.  We bundled up when it went down to the 50s and 40s.  We even hunkered down when the thermometer was in the 30s but when the weatherman said we’ll be in the 20s with a high of 32 we threw in the towel and packed up, not the camper, just an overnight bag and headed to Destin which is

about an hour or so from Panama City Beach.  We slept wonderfully last night in a Fairfield Inn and pulled the covers up a little closer when we looked at our phones and saw that it was 23 degrees.

At some point we realized the refrigerator back at our campsite was no longer keeping the food cold but was keeping the food from freezing.

Please know we are safe, warm, happy and grateful for a warm place to stay.

Ken & Cathy

Panama City Beach Update

If any of you are wondering how we are doing, this post might answer some of your questions.

The campground:  St. Andrews State Park is located in Panama City Beach. It is a beautiful place although the campsites are closer together than I like.

The Camper: It is small.  We sleep in it and we eat our meals in it.  While sitting at the dinner table we can easily reach into our dorm frig without getting up from the table.   We “hang out “ in our clam.

The  Clam: is our salvation.  It is where we watch TV and read at night.  It is VERY comfortable.  We have some artificial grass (astro-turf) as a floor, a couple of comfortable chairs, some lamps, our TV, a space heater and our tablets.  The clam is a 6 sided kitchen tent with walls and measures about 12 x 12.

Internet:  The state park offers Internet for about $5 per day but we have had no need for it as our Devices work well using our cell phone data package.

Temp:  The highs have been in the 60s and 70s.

Sleep: We have been sleeping wonderfully.  We often sleep for 9 hours.  We have a small commode in the camper which we bring out before we go to bed and put into a little closet during the day.

Activity:  We have  been taking very long walks almost every day.  We have only

been bike riding twice.  Today we went to an aquatic center to do some lap swimming before returning to the park for a 2:00 lecture in the nature center. It turned out the aquatic center is a huge outdoor heated pool!  The air temperature hit 74 today so it was  very  comfortable. We have also attended a Humphrey Bogart film festival, Casablanca, Maltese Falcon and Key Largo for $7.50 each.

Swimming:  Anyone who knows me knows that I swim quite a bit.  I enjoy it because swimming is one of those things that is uniquely solitary.  You don’t really notice

anyone else and therefore you’re not really competing with anybody else.  In your mind you can tell yourself that you are doing great!  Your looking good and feeling good!  You are the best swimmer in the pool!  That theory got shot to hell as we shared the pool with the Hendrix College swim team from Conway, Arkansas.  The men’s team, which is apparently sponsored by speedo, refused to be impressed that I could go 8-10 hours at night without going to the bathroom or that my shoes still have shoelaces.  No Velcro on this guy’s tennis shoes! Maybe if I had told them that I was at the ice bowl.

At one point their coach pointed to me and told his team, “look, you see what can happen….?”  I dove into the pool and assumed he finished his thought by saying, “If you practice, practice, practice”.

 The good news is that they are going back to Arkansas on Saturday and I’ll once again be comparing myself to the “reach and stretch” water group in the shallow end.

Panama City Beach

Cathy and I arrived in Panama City on Saturday just in time for 4:00 Mass at Our Lady of the Rosary.  After our last night in a hotel we power washed our camper and bikes and rinsed the salt off the car before checking into our home for the next two weeks, St. Andrew State Park in Panama City Beach.

We were welcomed by an abundance of wild life, set up our camp, hoisted our TV antenna, cooked dinner on the grill and ate, comfortably, outside at 6:00.  We even snuck in a short bike ride and a walk to orient ourselves this beautiful park.  We are now watching the Golden Globes in our clam.

The welcome mat was a gift
From Kathleen

Cathy and her new friend

Not ALL the wildlife is friendly

Move in day

Only the van, the clam and pop-up are ours.

The huge rig is belong to our neighbor..

Camping with Ken and Cathy

Some of you know that Cathy and I had taken a 12 year hiatus from camping. However last fall we dug our camper out of mothballs and headed out east for a 17 Day Road Trip. The success of that trip gave us the confidence to try an even longer trip to Florida. So with the thermometer hovering at two below zero and the wind chill at-19, we once again dug out our trailer (this time out of a frozen snowbank) and started making plans to head to Panama City before continuing elsewhere in the sunshine state.

Leaving the cottage with
camper and bikes

As we told people of our plans there were two distinctly different reactions. The first group thought this was a great idea!  This group was led by my cousin Maureen, her husband Bruce and my cousin Bill, all of whom did this themselves.  The second (and much larger) group thinks we are crazy!  When we look at these photos we'really not sure which group we belong to!

All hooked up and ready to go!

The camper