Panhandling

We are at a Walmart in Pensacola, Florida (map). "East" won the coin toss, principally because there are a couple of boats in the state that we might want to go look at, and we left the Dog River Marina late yesterday morning, after loading up the scooter and saying goodbye to our new friends Norm and Vicki. I am happy to report that the steering worked just fine while backing out of the parking space (one of the most stressful things power steering ever does), albeit there was some shudder as the air bubbles worked their way out of the system, and I had to top up the fluid before pulling out of the lot.

Our unintentional stay of several days at Dog River caused us to exhaust the larder, and we didn't even have anything aboard for lunch, so our first stop was the Walmart across the bay in Daphne, Alabama. While Louise did the grocery shopping, I put 200 gallons of diesel in at the on-site Murphy Oil station, where the price of $3.699 per gallon was the lowest we'd see all the way to Florida. From there our plan had been to do laundry across the street at the Magnolia Cleaners, but the place was packed on a Sunday afternoon and there were not enough machines available for us.

While having our lunch there in the parking lot we identified another couple of coin laundries here in Pensacola, on the way to a planned stopping spot on Santa Rosa island. If we had managed to finish the laundry in Daphne, we might well have spent the night at the Bass Pro store just north of town, a familiar stop for us. As it was, we got on I-10 east knowing it might well be dark when we finished the laundry in Pensacola.

The place we had our sights set upon is a parking lot on the island, listed in our Day's End directory as allowable for overnight parking up to 48 hours, with a dozen spaces designated for RVs. While the laundry was spinning, though, I spent some time looking at the imagery from the Google car, which seems to show a sign prohibiting RVs altogether. The directory entry was updated in March, 2011, and there is no way to know whether the Google street view photo is from before or after that date.

We had only ten minutes of daylight left when the laundry was done, and with a camp spot of uncertain status at least twenty minutes away, we decided to just pop back here only two miles from the laundromat. We'll head out to the island today, instead, where we'll have plenty of time to continue onward to a backup option should parking there no longer be allowed.

Now that we're in the Florida panhandle, we're going to slow down and relax. I'm still recuperating from the hose replacement project -- it feels like I did 200 squats and 100 sit-ups -- and we can both use some uninterrupted down-time to catch up. We'll probably spend a week in Fort Walton Beach, a place with which we are intimately familiar after a stay there of over a month last year.

Photo by WordRidden, used under a Creative Commons license.