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.