Full hookups on the lake

We are at the South Bay RV Park, at the southern end of Lake Okeechobee in the town of South Bay, Florida (map). Despite the commercial-sounding name, this is actually a Palm Beach County Park; at just over $26 a night it is a bargain.

It's a bit early in the season, and the park is mostly empty. There are two loops, and we are the only rig in one of them; there are probably a dozen or so rigs in the other. When we arrived yesterday afternoon, the gate was locked and unattended; we had to call the manager, who gave us the gate code and told us to just pick any space. There are a mix of 50-amp and 30-amp spaces, but I don't think there is a price difference. We chose a 30-amp site for its location -- in this weather, we don't need much power.

That was enough to top up our batteries, though, and run the air conditioners most of the time we've been here. It's not really that hot, but the humidity is quite high now. We've been very comfortable with one unit running. We didn't really need the hookups at all, but overnight stopping options between Lake Placid and Fort Lauderdale along this route are scarce -- the lone Wal-Mart, in Clewiston, does not allow overnight parking, and there are really no boondocking options. We could have pressed on to the Fort Lauderdale last night, where there are more options, but really wanted a shorter day.

We pulled the scooters out when we arrived, and had a nice ride up to the top of the Herbert Hoover Dike that runs around the lake. At sunset we set out to find dinner, but no dice. Neither South Bay nor Belle Glade a bit further along the lake had even a single open restaurant, other than fast food, on a Sunday night. We ended up heating up whatever was in the fridge. Still, we enjoyed the ride into town.

In a few minutes, we will be on our way to the Ft. Lauderdale area. With the airport requirement off the table, we decided on the more direct route, rather then heading through Palm Beach and all the glotch in between.

Mid-state stopover

We are at the Wal-Mart in Sebring, Flordida (map).

I plotted our route from Tampa to the general Palm Beach area, since that's a good compromise between Miami/Ft. Lauderdale and Daytona. That route will take us past the north end of Lake Okeechobee, and Sebring was a good stopping point. In addition to the Wal-Mart, I knew there was an Elks lodge here that could accommodate us if we needed it.

The Wal-Mart was more directly on our route, and we needed supplies anyway. We ended up strolling across the street to Ruby Tuesday for a casual dinner. In a few minutes, we will continue on towards Palm Beach.

In the meantime, we've heard good news that our friend was released from the hospital and is doing much better. Apparently an acute crisis, likely from chemo, that has passed. So airports are no longer really driving our agenda. That said, we still have friends to visit in Ft. Lauderdale and we are still looking into a Keys trip as well as dive instruction, so getting over to the east coast is a fine plan.

Image by sun dazed, used under a Creative Commons license.

Breezing through Tampa

We are at a Wal-Mart in Tampa (map). As I wrote yesterday, this store is marked No Overnight on my list, and is so posted in most of the lot, but when we called to ask, they told us it was OK. When we arrived, security directed us to a section of the lot near Dale Mabry that was not posted, adjacent to a fenced-off empty lot where Tia's TexMex restaurant once stood. It was quiet enough here, and darker than the main lot.

We took a lone scooter out to ride the two and a half miles to the Centre Club for dinner last night. Dinner was quite tasty, and while we were there we were reminded that many of these clubs are serving Thanksgiving dinner. While that would not be included on our super-duper free meal every month plan, it's definitely an option in case we don't come up with anything else.

Shortly after we returned and stowed the scooter, I was out walking the dog when a news van with a TV crew from local channel 13 news showed up in our little remote parking lot. They deployed their 50' antenna mast and microwave dish, so I knew they were setting up for a live shot. I tuned the news in on the TV; it turns out the live shot was of the shopping center across the street, for a reporter doing a lead-in and then wrap-up on a previously taped segment on unemployment (seasonal retail jobs, it seems, are way down this year). What a waste, we thought, to deploy an electronic news-gathering van for two and a half minutes of talking head, that could easily have been shot in the studio. Fittingly, featured in the center of the shot was the still-illuminated store sign for now-defunct Circuit City.

While we were at dinner we received a phone call that threw something of a monkey wrench into any attempt to develop concrete plans. One of our dear friends has been hospitalized in California with complications from cancer. We are awaiting further word as to whether he will even be lucid enough to recognize us before deciding whether to fly out there for a visit.

While we had been considering perhaps settling in someplace pleasant here in the Tampa Bay area for a few days while we figured out plans for Thanksgiving, scuba, and bus maintenance, we are now motivated to cross over to the other side of the state. That's because most of the less expensive flight options are out of Daytona, Palm Beach, or Ft. Lauderdale, and this will put us closer. Besides, we need to end up there anyway. In a few minutes we will start rolling in that direction, angling down towards Lake Okeechobee.

Photo by Marcus Q, used under a Creative Commons license.

Land O' Lakes

We are at what used to be a Wal-Mart in unincorporated Hillsborough County, just north of Lutz (map). The store has moved about a mile away, to a much larger facility, recently enough that they are still dismantling this one.

The store here did not allow overnight parking, I presume because the lot is really too small for it in such a popular destination. (The new store around the corner, with its much larger lot, does allow it -- I called them to check.) The signs are still up, but with the store now closed, we were undisturbed. A couple of semis also spending the night in the lot was a reassuring sight. I am guessing the cameras are still hot (Wal-Mart still has lots of assets in place here), but the roving patrols have been discontinued, and I noticed a person sleeping under a blanket between the store entrance and a vending machine; he was also undisturbed. We're tucked in a discreet out-of-the-way corner, far from either the idling trucks or transients sleeping al fresco.

We chose this spot because it is literally across the street from where our friends are staying; their site is a two minute walk from here. We had a nice evening with them, spending hours catching up and having a nice meal at casual Italian restaurant Capri a couple miles away, one of Louise's many coupon coups at Restaurant.com. No liquor license, but they let us bring in a nice bottle of Merlot that I ran to get at the Publix next door.

They picked us up for breakfast this morning at a nice cafe just a couple blocks from here; we had a great visit and enjoyed catching up. Given the current status of this property, we could probably spend another night here if we needed to, but we'd rather not push our luck.

Instead, we will move to a Wal-Mart close to downtown Tampa, where we've stayed before. Again our purpose is to visit our club there, just two miles away. Last time we took a cab, but tonight we'll pull a scooter out. Oddly, when I checked my No Overnight Parking list, this store is on it, but I called them anyway to ask. As last time, they said it was no problem as long as we stayed in the further reaches of the lot. It's very rare that our list is wrong in this way, although more than once, we've hit a store not on the list where overnight parking is forbidden. Given the scarcity of parking throughout Florida, I also checked the Tampa city ordinances, which thankfully do not regulate parking on private property.

We'll be heading that way in just a few minutes. I confess that, once again, I have no real plan for where we will head in the morning.

Image by Wyrmworld, used under a Creative Commons license.

Suggestions?

We are at a Wal-Mart in Ocala, Florida, just west of Silver Springs (map).

We had a very pleasant and uncrowded drive down US-27 from Branford, after a short stint on US-129 from Live Oak. Ocala was a logical stopping place, and there are three Wal-Marts here. Unfortunately, the one closest to our "route" (such as it is) is a no-overnight location, so we had to come a few miles east to this one. We had a nice dinner at the Horse and Hounds pub just a few doors down.

On our way here, it dawned on me that our friends Tom and Kathleen had told us they'd be in Bushnell -- we had missed them earlier this month in Glen Burnie, MD by only a day. That's just an hour south of here, so I messaged them on the Blackberry when we knew we'd be here. As it turns out, they've moved to Lutz, which is closer to Tampa, and, had we known that, we could have bypassed Ocala and continued directly south on either US-19 or US-41. Still, it's not much of a diversion west, and we arranged to stop by this afternoon and have dinner with them. They are staying at an Encore park there, which I don't think is open to the public. My map shows a Wal-Mart across the street, which my list says is no-overnight, but Tom told us the place is closed as the store moved around the corner. I'm hoping we'll be able to park there for a night while we visit.

Our plan beyond dinner tonight is still very much a tabula rasa. However, there are three things on our to-do list for the remainder of the year, and we can probably use some help from our readers here in the form of some suggestions. The three things are not really related, but combining them into the same stop or two would be a bonus.

First, as I mentioned yesterday, we are looking to get our open-water scuba certification. We've both done two "resort dives," so we know we enjoy the sport, but neither of us has fancied the idea of doing the certification in anything other than warm water. Much to the disdain, I might add, of the many dive shops where we lived before we hit the road, who all did their open-water work in Monterey Bay, where the water is 50°-55° year-round. Brrr.

So a suggestion for a dive shop is in order, with the requirements that the open-water work be in relatively warm water, and that there is someplace close by where we can legally park the bus. Reasonable pricing for a total package would also be nice, but bus parking is paramount. For example, my research so far has suggested that the Keys are an ideal place to learn to dive, but parking options there are extremely limited. Which is an excellent segue to...

We'd like to re-visit the Keys. I know this may be a pipe dream, but I'm hoping we'll be able to find an opening or two at one or more of the state parks there. (On our first trip to the Keys, the state parks there did not allow pets in the campgrounds, a policy which changed the very next month.) The parks are booked months in advance, but cancellations do happen. That said, if we do make it that far, we'd enjoy another visit to Key West; however, we've vowed not to do that again from the extremely distant, overpriced, and overcrowded campgrounds on Stock Island. I know I have asked this here before, but we have many new readers since then: if you have access to a parking spot on Key West closer to Duval street, we're more than happy to fork over the money we'd be spending at, say, Boyd's to someone else.

Lastly, somewhere in all of this, we need to get the oil changed. While that sounds straightforward, like many things about Odyssey, it's never as simple as it sounds. Specifically, we need a shop that stocks straight 40-weight oil in a bulk system with a pump. Our ancient two-stroke Detroit requires the single-weight, and the location and arrangement of our oil fills make it nearly impossible to just pour the oil in from a jug (I have to add make-up oil this way, and it involves a three-foot hose, a giant funnel held high above my head, and three or four minutes per gallon). So a recommendation for a diesel shop with this amenity would be appreciated.

In the spirit of returning the favor, I will share with you a "secret" we discovered yesterday. We stopped by a post office to mail in our paperwork for our new PMB and to pick up a couple of "change of address kits." The post office has managed to outsource these, so that they cost the USPS nothing at all. Unsurprisingly, the contractor is paying for them with advertising, but it turns out they actually contain some nice coupons. For example, a 10% discount at Lowe's on any single visit, up to $5,000 (for a potential discount of $500). Nothing on these coupons requires you to have actually moved (although they are limited to one per household and are time-limited), so if you have a big purchase coming up, walk in to your local post office and see what's in the free change of address kit. Ours included discounts at Lowe's, Best Buy, and several other retailers.

Photo by hashmil, used under a Creative Commons license.

We're moving!

We are at the Wal-Mart in Live Oak, Florida (map), only a few miles south of the Spirit of the Suwannee.

We had a mad scramble on Saturday to nail down a new "address" and sign all the paperwork to make ourselves legal. I have to say that Friday's news that our mail service was closing was roughly akin to an apartment dweller being evicted on two weeks notice -- it was that disruptive. We ultimately decided that changing our address into a different state was too big a step to take without enough time to do all the research and fully understand all the consequences. So even though it means we will have to do this all over again in a few years, when we move from the bus to a boat, we'll at least have time then to do all the legwork in advance. We settled on a "move" just down the street to a UPS Store, although it's actually in a different city. I will try to update our contact page with the new address within the next day or so.

Yesterday, being Monday, was our first opportunity to get the USPS forms 1583 notarized, and contact many of the businesses and government agencies that have our mailing address. Between spending a couple of hours on that, rising late due to a late night out socializing with our friends Monday night (not to mention the music running to well past midnight), and tearing down our extensive camp site (having deployed absolutely everything for the long weekend, including the patio mat and all the furniture, the hot tub, the screen tent over the hot tub, and the scooters), we got a very late start yesterday. We also took an hour for a final lunch and goodbyes with our friends, and we did not roll out of the park until after 3.

Not only did we not feel like driving a couple of hours starting that late, we also had no clue which way to head once we got to Live Oak. So we decided to just stop here for the night. We were certainly not alone, this location being right next to the freeway. Neither of our cell phones worked well while we were at the park, so this was also our first opportunity to make a dozen or so phone calls to update our address with various entities, and we spent most of the morning here doing just that. This was also our first opportunity to test out the repairs to the satellite dish, and all is well; in fact, I think the new reflector is giving us a slightly better signal strength, probably because the gusset cracks in the old one had the feedhorn slightly out of the focal "sweet spot."

Now that the crisis is behind us, and we can turn our attention to other matters, we've decided to head basically south from here, splitting the difference between the coasts while we do some more research on where to spend Thanksgiving, where to have the bus worked on (we are due for oil and filter changes), and maybe where to go for our open-water scuba certification, something we keep saying we are going to get done in Florida "when we have time." Tonight we should be somewhere near Ocala.

Photo by Andrew Huff, used under a Creative Commons license.

Return to Sender, Address Unknown...

We are at the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park, on the Suwannee River (yes, the one made famous by the Stephen Foster song), just north of Live Oak, Florida (map). We've settled in for the weekend, taking the scooters out to zip around the park, and even setting up the patio mat and the hot tub.

We have a nice site in the woods with full hookups. We can't get the dish on-line, but we have plenty of signal from the park's Wi-Fi network. Festival admission is being handled by an outside promoter, but we were able to get the insider rate, and we have our wristbands. Now all we need is some tie-dye to fit in (and plenty is available for sale).

We've been able to enjoy lots of the music right here at our site, which is fairly close to three of the main stages. That's good, because I decided to tackle the "dish project" today, and spent five hours or so on the roof. The music made a nice backdrop.

"What dish project?" I hear you ask. The MotoSat DataStorm self-aiming internet satellite system has been creaking a lot lately, and I've had it on my to-do list to get up there, pull all the servo-motors out, and lubricate everything. The reflector was also "done," in the sense that it's got lots of cracks in the gussets, and the lower lip, to which is attached the feedhorn mounting arm, appeared to be on the verge of self-destruction. We've used this thing constantly for over five years, and I bought it third-hand to begin with, not to mention we whacked the feedhorn off once on a low overpass, so it's really no surprise.

Back when we destroyed the feedhorn, I repaired the system myself by buying an entire used DirecWay system on eBay. I think I spent about $150, and I was able to just mount up the feedhorn bits that had been destroyed to our existing reflector and mount. That left me with a spare modem, which I sold on eBay, a spare transmitter, which came in handy a few months ago when the old one quit, and a spare reflector, which I asked my folks to store in their attic. Knowing I needed to refurbish the dish, we picked that up from them when we visited last month.

I've been waiting for the conjunction of warm weather, a full spare day, and access to Wi-Fi (in case I needed to look something up while I had the dish apart and off-line), and today was it. The spare reflector has otherwise been taking up space and generally getting in the way down in the scooter bay, so we really did not want to wait for the next opportunity.

It took me all afternoon -- I had not realized the new reflector would need some additional holes drilled into it, and the mounting studs removed -- but the whole mount has been cleaned and lubricated, the reflector changed out (and hardly a moment too soon, based on the extensive cracking at the feedarm mounting point), and the full range of motion tested. I can't actually check the system "hot" here under the trees, but I have no reason to suspect anything I worked on today will impact the ability to acquire signal.

While I was in the middle of reassembling everything, Louise popped her head up through the hatch to tell me "we have a huge problem." I thought one of the pets had escaped, or the toilet had quit working. Nope -- she had just called our mail forwarding service to confirm they sent our mail out yesterday, and they casually informed her that "oh, we've been meaning to call you -- we are closing permanently on December 1st."

WHAT?!? With only two weeks notice?

So, yes, we have a huge problem. We have just two weeks to find another mail service and change our address with absolutely everyone. The post office will not forward mail for PMB's, so we can't just fill out one of those moving kits they have there at the counter and expect any mail to follow us. And we have to do it all by remote control; non-trivial, since the post office requires positive ID and a signature on a form in order to open up a PMB at a new service.

One of the things we are now considering is whether to open a PMB in a different state. As long-time readers here know, our plan for when we are "done" with the bus (whenever that is -- we have no schedule for it, and it could be as much as five years from now) is to get a long-distance power boat, and continue our adventure by sea. The domicile considerations for boat ownership are different than those for full-time RV living, and Washington is not necessarily the best option. However, I'm not sure I can fully research these issues in the limited time we now have available to us.

In the meantime, if you are one of the very, very few entities that has occasion to send us anything by mail or delivery service, if it arrives after the end of this month, it will be returned to sender. As soon as I have a new mailing address, I will update our contact page and post it here.

Photo by shoehorn99, used under a Creative Commons license.

Picky about our Wal-Marts

We are at the Wal-Mart in Lake City, Florida (map).

Yesterday morning we heard from our friend Charles the air traffic controller that he had arranged a tour for us at 1pm. Knowing it was a good forty minutes away, and we'd have to park and pull the scooters out, we started packing up the bus for travel right at noon.

Just as I was starting my walk-around, one of our readers pulled up and walked over to me. Apparently, he had also stopped by the afternoon before, when we were out getting our massages. I felt bad that we did not have the time to linger and talk, considering that up to that moment, it had been a lazy day in the parking lot. If I got it right, he is converting an Eagle; it was nice to meet, as brief as it was.

We drove most of the way to Hilliard and parked Odyssey at the Winn-Dixie supermarket south of town. We were already a bit behind at that point, so we only took out one scooter and rode up to ZJX two-up. While our drive up in the bus was pleasant and sunny, as luck would have it, the rain (from Ida) started just as we rode the last mile to the facility. Oh well.

After a screening not unlike what is required to board an airplane (I had to leave my Leatherman in the bike, and we had to clear through metal detectors), we passed through security and Charles met us at the gatehouse. He gave us a most excellent tour lasting nearly two hours, which included some time sitting at a scope and listening in to the communications with the aircraft, a visit with the National Weather Service forecasters, and even a tour of the massive computer complex that makes it all work (he knows we are total geeks). Thanks, Charles!

By the time we got the scooter stowed and started rolling back south, it was past 3pm. We were out of water, and so we stopped at a truck stop in Baldwin to put some in, making it past 4pm by the time we were rolling west. Also, the skies were very dark from the massive cloud cover Ida brought with her. We decided to make it a short day and stop early, rather than try to make it all the way to the Suwannee.

Our GPS and guide both said there was a Wal-Mart in Macclenny, and the map showed several restaurants nearby. When we rolled up, though, we found the store had moved. There were no other services near the new location, and I did not feel like cooking in the parking lot, so we pressed on to this location. We tried to have dinner at Applebees, a block away, but they were running a promotion for Veterans Day and the wait was 45 minutes. We ended up at Texas Road house a few doors down, where we waltzed right in.

In a few minutes we will pull up stakes and head over to the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park, and get settled in for the weekend.

Photo by US Army Korea - IMCOM, used under a Creative Commons license.

A plan emerges

We are at the Wal-Mart at City Square, near the airport at the north end of Jacksonville, Florida (map).

We needed to get out of the truck stop yesterday afternoon, but with Ida not weakening as fast as expected, and still threatening the gulf coast, we did not want to overshoot Jacksonville or the early turn onto I-10, the fastest way to Hattiesburg or Baton Rouge. This Wal-Mart had been our original goal for Sunday night, and it served the same purpose last night. We did not realize it when we first set our sights here, but a bonus was that there is an Olive Garden in this same complex.

When we first pulled in to the enormous City Square shopping center, we were disappointed to see a sign forbidding overnight parking of trucks or RVs. It was not listed as prohibited, though, on my big Wal-Mart "no no" list, so we checked with customer service, who informed us that we could park overnight "in the last row of the garden center." Sure enough, the entire swath along the garden center, between Wal-Mart and Lowe's, has been occupied by tractor-trailers since we arrived. We picked a discreet spot next to some of Wal-Mart's ubiquitous shipping containers -- it seems no matter how big they build the new stores, they still need extra storage.

We loaded up on supplies in the store, then headed over to OG for dinner. On the way we walked past a huge Gander Mountain store, and I found some much-needed sandals for 60% off, and Clarks at that. In fact, there are quite a few interesting stores here, and even a multiplex cinema; we ended up making an evening of shopping.

When we had not gotten any calls by mid-morning regarding the storm, we knew we would not be needed this time. So we dragged the scooters out and rode the dozen miles into town for a nice lunch at the University Club, followed by a quick riding tour of downtown Jacksonville. We needed to be back for a 3:30 Red Cross conference call, though, and we made it back just in time to escape the rain that Ida brought here with her.

We'll be here for an uncharacteristic second night. I managed to get in touch with our local friends; he's a tin pusher at Jacksonville Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) and has offered us a tour tomorrow. The center is actually in Hilliard, so heading further south from here would not be the right move; I suggested we'd move tonight to the Wal-Mart on Lem Turner, just a few miles from here and actually the closest place to the ARTCC we could legally park. When he heard that, he wrote that we should emphatically not stay there (he feels it's not a good neighborhood) and suggested we stay where we are instead.

That gave us the opportunity to patronize yet another business here in the City Square; it turns out there is a massage studio just the other side of Wal-Mart called "Massage Heights" (a chain, I think) and we went in for a pair of Swedish massages at the special introductory rate of $40 for an hour. What a treat. There are half a dozen other restaurants in this complex as well, should we have needed one, but today's big meal out was lunch. But we are definitely marking this place down on our list of great overnight stops, considering it is easily accessible from both I-95 and US-17.

Our friends here in Jacksonville also happen to be among the owners of the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park, a couple hours west of here in Live Oak. This weekend is the Bear Creek Music Festival, and since we have the happy coincidence of being in the area and having some time on our hands, we've decided to attend. I'm sure we'll enjoy the festival, but mostly we are looking forward to spending some time with our friends. The last time we tried to do this, during Magnoliafest a couple years ago, we had to bail out before the festival even started, to respond to massive wildfires in California.

So tomorrow morning we will head up to Callahan or thereabouts, and find a place to "day park" while we zip up to the ARTCC on the scooters (security at a restricted FAA facility would plotz if we rolled up in the bus). From there we will head south on US-301 to US-90 and west to Live Oak. Of course, I still have no clue what we'll be doing once the weekend is over.

Photo by ASurroca, used under a Creative Commons license.

Storm Watch

We are at the Petro truck stop in Kingsland, Georgia (map).

When we called the River's End Campground on Tybee Island yesterday, they told us a large rally had just come in and they had no spaces left that could fit us. We'd been seeing a lot of Airstreams in town, so perhaps it was an airstream rally. In any case, that called for a different plan.

By this time, the forecast for Hurricane Ida had strengthened, and a hurricane watch had been issued for a good stretch of the gulf coast, from New Orleans all the way to lower Alabama. After checking our projected travel times to the three Red Cross "hot sites" in Montgomery Alabama, Hattiesburg Mississippi, and Baton Rouge Louisiana, we decided it would be prudent to head out of Savannah and get a bit further south, in case the storm did some damage on landfall. We ended up having a final lunch with our friends, who picked us up and took us out to Tybee just so we wouldn't miss it entirely.

We set our sights on a Wal-Mart just north of Jacksonville. Owing to a very late start, it was well past dark for the last hour of our drive, and ~20 miles of highway construction, with narrow lanes constrained by jersey barriers and no shoulders, took its toll, so we ended up here, about half an hour shy. Other than being parked under a Klieglight, it was a fine stop.

At some point during our drive, the hurricane watch got extended all the way to Mexico Beach at the eastern end of the Florida panhandle. By this morning, the watch had turned into a warning for the gulf coasts of Mississippi and Alabama,. At this writing, however, the cyclone is becoming extratropical, the warnings have been canceled, and the watches have been downgraded from hurricane to tropical storm. I think it is extremely unlikely that we will be called.

There are a mere 20 days left in the Atlantic hurricane season, and Ida is the first named storm to make landfall in the continental US this season. This is the first time in four years that we have made it all the way to November without being called; at this time last year, we had already been deployed for 14 weeks straight.

Now we find ourselves in a truck stop with no real plan for the next couple of weeks. We have some friends in Jacksonville, and I have dropped them a note in case they might be available for a visit in the next few days. We have some tentative plans to catch up with friends in Fort Lauderdale the first week in December, which leaves the rest of this month to fill out. I think we will work our way slowly down the Atlantic coast, catching up on our project backlog, and we might even try to visit the Keys again, now that Opal is allowed into the state parks there.

Photo by House Of Sims, used under a Creative Commons license.