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.