Goodbye, 2011

We are at the Arcadia 2012 Bus Conversion Rally, at the Turner Agri-Civic Center in Arcadia, Florida (map). While we did not really plan it this way, this is the same way we finished out 2010, although we were parked a couple hundred feet further west of this spot. I posted a few days ago that we are visible in the satellite photo taken last year.

Parked right next to us are Chris and Cherie of Technomadia in their GM 4106. They bought Karen's Mini Cooper and so, oddly, we have the same car parked next to us as last year. Once again we set up the hot tub between the coaches.

This is also the second year in a row wherein we have had three Neoplan Spaceliners at the same rally -- in addition to Odyssey, our good friends Steve and Harriet Siems are here in their Lamar-built 45' Spaceliner, and our other friends Lou and Renea Kirk left this afternoon in their Pilsting-built two-axle model. All three coaches had originally been converted by Pegasus and so we have a lot in common. I'm sorry we were not able to arrange a group photo with all three coaches, since the Kirks had another commitment this evening.

We've reconnected with many other friends and acquaintances whom we see but once a year, if that, including Busnut On-line webmaster Ian, Jack and Diane (not the ones from the little ditty), John from Costa Rica, Ewen from Canada, Dave and Carol with the extra-spiffy Flxible Starliner, John from Central Florida Bus where we had work done last year, Marty from Georgia who generously provided us a parking spot one year when we flew away, Ace and Susan, Ken and Pam, Jack and Paula, Bill and Brenda, and many others too numerous to list. We also met some new friends including Sean and Angie who are retrofitting an existing conversion to full time with their four children.

For the first time ever I did not present a seminar this time around. I did participate as one of two panelists on a round-table discussion which seemed to be well received. The other panelist was none other than the inimitable Luke from U.S. Coach in New Jersey, where we've also had work done. Luke and I have been doing the round table for three years now and it's a format that works well.

Our plan had been to leave tomorrow, as today is the last official day of the rally. However, Louise was expecting a package at the post office today which did not arrive. We'll spend one more night here at the Turner Center with Steve and Harriet and whoever else might be around, and Monday we'll probably roll back to the Wal-Mart. We need to stay until Tuesday since the post office will be closed Monday.

We have a few days of downtime between now and January 11 when Louise has signed up for a choral event in Tampa. We'll probably roll in to the Tampa Bay area a few days ahead and maybe look at a couple of boats before that. We hope to also connect with friends in the area including James and Maria as well as Niles. After her choral event, we'll be rolling back to Montgomery, Alabama to help rearrange the Red Cross hot site there, and then we will be heading west towards Las Vegas and beyond.

Treasure coast holiday

We are parked near our friends' house in Vero Beach, Florida. No map link today in consideration of their privacy. We've had a very enjoyable Christmas with them, and they fed us dinner on Christmas Eve as well as Christmas day, and a nice brunch in between. Tonight we will walk back over for hors d'oeuvres during the football game.

We had hoped to park right in front of their house, but a low tree on their private street made that impossible. Instead we are parked on the lawn of the neighbor three houses down, who is in the midst of a full-gut remodel, and thus is not living on the property. Very nice of the neighbor to allow us to park here, but, of course, the remodel will be done before our next visit. We're enjoying it while we can.

Tomorrow we will head out sometime mid-day and head towards Arcadia for the annual bus rally there. We're not due until Wednesday, so we will probably stop for the night somewhere near Lake O.

A boatload of boats

We are at the Walmart in Fort Pierce, Florida (map). I stayed here back in January while Louise was on her training cruise, and, just as then, there were quite a few rigs here when we arrived. Also just as then, a circle of lawn chairs was deployed between a pair of rigs, another candidate for my Walmart Hall-of-shame. The roving security patrol was over there as well, and if he didn't have a problem with it, then I suppose we shouldn't either.

Nevertheless, just as last time, I wanted to distance myself from this behavior and so we rolled over to the other section of the lot where the trucks normally park. This time, though, security came over and asked us to park over with the other rigs -- oh well. We still parked as far away as we could. We were the only ones still in the lot here when we got up this morning.

Yesterday we met up with our broker Curtis and his wife in Stuart and looked at five boats there before lunch. After a quick burger in town we piled into the car and headed north to Vero Beach to look at one final boat, for a total of six boats in one very full day. It was a great experience, because it allowed us to compare quite a few similar boats side by side, and we knocked a number of models right off our list.

Once again the boat that appealed to us the most was a Selene, in this case a 47. This one was older and in poorer condition than the one we looked at in New Bern a couple months ago, and yet carries the same asking price, so it's not really a contender, but it was interesting to see a different example of the same model. We really think that if a Selene 43-48 in decent shape comes along at the right price, we will snap it up, but at this writing we still have not found it.

We still have a couple of boat models on our "to see" list, including a post-1990 DeFever 49 pilothouse, and maybe an Ocean Alexander Classico 430 or 460, but there are no available examples of those on the east coast at the moment.

This morning we will get our shopping done here in the store (no point in going in there in the evening the week before Christmas) and then head north to Vero Beach. With any luck, we'll be able to squeeze into a parking spot near our friends' house there for a few days.

From space to treasure

We are at the Elks lodge in Port St. Lucie, Florida (map). We'd spent a week here this time last year, so we thought we knew right where to park, and we were looking forward to a friendly lodge which we remembered as having a nice bar and the occasional dinner. Unfortunately the lodge is closed for remodeling, and apparently has been since July, although there is nary a mention of it on the official web site, and the phones go unanswered with no message.

Actually, our hearts sank when we initially approached, because it almost appeared the place had been razed. The 15+ acres of woods that had surrounded the lodge (and visible, at this writing, in the satellite view) have been bulldozed in an unrelated stormwater management project being undertaken by the city. The area that was normally used for RV parking and where we stayed last year has been given over to the construction trailer and equipment parking for that project, we assume a loan from the lodge to the prime contractor, and instead we've parked in the front part of the main parking lot, since the lodge is closed anyway.

Of course, with no way to check, we had to assume that contractors would start arriving for both projects first thing this morning, and so we parked oriented for a speedy exit and set an early alarm, just in case. So far we've seen only two contractor trucks for the lodge remodeling, and the stormwater folks don't seem to be using this part of the lot, so we lucked out. Our original plan to spend two nights here is out, though, and we'll be moving along shortly.

Our destination is Stuart, just five miles south, where we will meet up with our friend and broker Curtis Stokes to look at several boats. Most of the boats are at the docks of the Krogen and Nordhavn brokerages there, conveniently located in the same building with an even more convenient empty lot right next door where we can park the bus. This is the very same lot where we spent three days a couple years ago for Trawler Expo.

As I ranted here last year, we can no longer stay overnight in Stuart, and so when we are done for the day we will head north, probably to Fort Pierce where I scoped out several overnight options back in January when Louise did her training cruise. Tomorrow we will meet up with our friends in Vero Beach.

Odyssey from space

For the first time in our seven years on the road, we've managed to spot Odyssey in a Google Earth satellite photograph, here. Thanks to our good friends "Buswarrior" and "Depewtee" who posted links to the satellite view of the rally grounds in threads on the bus boards (here and here) about this year's rally. You can read my posts on last year's rally, when this was taken, starting here.

In this overhead view you can clearly make out Odyssey, and just south of us, Ben and Karen's bus as well as their Mini Cooper. In the shadow between the two buses you can see the round shape of our hot tub which we enjoyed nightly last year. If we make the rally this year we'll try to park in more or less the same spot, since that's about as far as we can be from the water spigot and still fill the hot tub.

A relaxing week in Cocoa Beach

We are in Cocoa Beach, at a location which will remain undisclosed in respect for our host. It is the same spot at which we stayed back in August, a short walk from the beach as well as several restaurants. We arrived last Sunday evening after an easy drive from Orlando.

We wanted to come here because we knew it would be relaxing, and it has been. We've both had massages at a resort a short scooter ride away, and with most of the tourists gone, we've had the local dining scene mostly to ourselves. The weather has been a mixed bag, but we've had several evenings where it was pleasant enough to enjoy a glass of wine on our deck, in view of the ocean.

The location is not conducive to getting any of my "outside" projects knocked off the list, such as the bad ground on a couple of the marker lights. But we have taken the opportunity presented by the downtime to do some housecleaning, and I've listed quite a few items on eBay. And I've been emailing back and forth with our broker about lining up boat visits for this week.

I am still waiting to hear from him on a specific schedule, but we hope to have some visits lined up in the Stuart/Fort Pierce/Vero Beach area later this week, and/or possibly the week after Christmas. By the end of the week we are due in Vero Beach where we will visit our friends Chris and Alyse Caldwell of Captain Chris Yacht Services. We've been invited to spend some of the holiday with them, and we are looking forward to it.

Exactly where we will park over the next two weeks is something of an open question. For any boat visits in Stuart we will likely park at the Port St. Lucie Elks lodge, as the Stuart lodge is no longer an option. Over the holiday, we will try to get as close as possible to our hosts; there is a Walmart not far away which will at least be a good base from which to scope out other options.

Once we are in that neighborhood, it's really not a long hop over to Arcadia, and we are contemplating swinging by for the annual bus rally there. We are long past the point of needing to go to bus rallies for any reason, and I have mostly enjoyed presenting seminars at the last few. Having spent a considerable amount of money, though, to attend the rally in Chattanooga for that purpose in October, only to have my workshops canceled due to lack of attendance (overall, not just for my workshop), I'm a little burnt out on the whole seminar thing.

Consequently, I could not commit to doing any seminars at this year's Arcadia event, and, therefore, I am not on the schedule. If we do end up going, I'll offer to do something ad hoc, as the seminar schedule seems really light to me. I've always got items I can put out for the "swap meet," and it would obviate the need to figure out what else to do on New Year's Eve. As a bonus, our friends Chris and Cherie of Technomadia are planning to attend, and we missed connecting with them here on the Space Coast due to various schedule issues.

Exactly when we will leave Cocoa Beach is also an unanswered question. We figure to be here at least through tonight, and after that it will depend on what the boat viewing schedule looks like. I expect to hear back from the broker by sometime tomorrow morning. In any case, the next blog post will be from our next location, wherever that proves to be.

Bound for the coast

We are at our customary stealth-parking spot in Orlando, Florida (map). We've had a quiet and pleasant two nights here, in near-perfect weather. We arrived just at dusk on Friday, after slogging through traffic from Disney, and shortly afterward Cherie and Chris from Technomadia showed up in their Mini, into which we all piled for a dinner run to Garibaldi Mexican Restaurant just down the street.

We had a nice evening with them until they needed to leave for the airport, just a few minutes from here, to make their pickup. I expect we will run into them later this week on the Space Coast, as well. They also have plans for the Arcadia bus rally this year. We have not committed to the rally, but may attend if we still are in the area.

Yesterday we decided to pop over to the Florida Mall, also just a few blocks away. Wow, what a zoo. I managed to get what I wanted, which was a "chair massage," and Louise made some progress on the very limited holiday shopping that we do each year, but being at the mall two weekends before Christmas was a good reminder why we have mostly "checked out" of consumer culture. (Our younger nieces and nephews, who have not made such an election, are the only ones for whom we shop.)

Last night we rode the scooters into downtown Orlando for dinner at the Citrus Club, which was delightful as always. This morning our plan was to just relax right here until we were motivated to get back on the road to the coast. We were surprised, then, when amplified live music started up while we were having our morning coffee.

It turns out the light industrial suite at the end of the complex across the street, which until recently has been the back-office operation for a chain of art galleries, is now leased to one of those new-age non-denominational churches. I guess the nice weather motivated them to have their services in the parking lot, and thus started the music from a half hour beforehand to well afterward, a good two plus hours starting at 9:30am. Next time we are here, we'll park at the other end of the lot.

In a few minutes we will continue east to Cocoa Beach, where we expect to settle down for a week or so and catch up on errands.

Photo by tom.arthur, used under a Creative Commons license.

Holidays at the fort

We are at Disney's Fort Wilderness campground (map), on the Walt Disney World campus near Orlando, Florida. Long time readers know we have been here several times in the past, and it is one of the few "resort" campgrounds we'll willingly pay for. That's because, as spendy as it is ($57.50 per night, tax included, after our AAA discount), it's the least expensive way to stay on Disney property and get all the on-site benefits such as extra park hours and access to Disney's extensive transportation system. Plus, Fort Wilderness is very festive around the holidays.

This year we are again in the same loop as one of the perennial holiday decorating champions, whom we wrote about a few years ago. We're just two sites away, which means we can never get lost -- I'm pretty sure his site is visible from space. Last night we rode the scooters around about half the park just to look at all the decorated sites. Even though we were here earlier in the season last year, in November, this year there seem to be fewer decorations. Also, the campground seems much emptier. I'm not sure if fuel prices have grounded some RVers. or the ever-increasing cost of a Disney vacation is just not in some family budgets this year (or both).

Since this visit is a quick fly-by for us, we only bought two-day park passes. The downside to that is there are really no discounts available on those. We spent Tuesday at Disney's Hollywood Studios, and the light crowds meant we got to ride several of our favorites, including the Tower of Terror and the Rock 'n' Roller Coaster, more than once. This was also our first time on Star Tours since the revamp that changed the script and added 3D. The Osborne Family Lights was spectacular as always, and we enjoyed dinner at the Brown Derby.

We discovered that we could see most of the fireworks at the Magic Kingdom from our roof deck in this space, although this is the first time we were unable to get the satellite dialed in. We're using the mobile hot spot on my phone instead, with good 3g service available here in the campground. After getting parked and set up Monday afternoon, we went over to the Wilderness Lodge for dinner at Artist's Point, which was disappointing. Everything at Disney is overly expensive for what it is -- all part of the gestalt -- but at this restaurant I felt it was not worth it. By contrast, the Brown Derby was excellent.

Yesterday we spent most of the day right here at Fort Wilderness. I had hopes of making it to the pool, but we ended up riding the monorail around to some other resorts instead. Today we will use our final park day to visit the Magic Kingdom, and I might try to get over to the pool tomorrow instead. We'll need to check out in the morning, but we'll spend the afternoon in the section of the main parking lot reserved for that purpose.

Tomorrow evening we will head over to our stealth parking spot across town for the weekend. We have dinner plans with Chris and Cherie of Technomadia, who are rolling in to Orlando to pick up a relative at the airport in the evening. On Sunday we'll continue east to Cocoa Beach.

Photo of the Osbourne Family Lights at Disney's Hollywood Studios by random letters, used under a Creative Commons license.

Chiefly eastbound

We are at the Walmart in Chiefland, Florida (map). I would have liked to stop another 45 minutes or so east of here last night, but this is the last "legal" Walmart en route to Orlando, and other than a truck stop on I-75 there are no other good stopping opportunities along the way. Louise said it was appropriate, since "Chief" is my qualification under the new Red Cross relief structure.

There was a decent Mexican joint in the shopping plaza here, although they would not serve us any beer or wine on a Sunday night. In addition to doing a little shopping in the store, we also picked up The King's Speech at the Redbox, which is a wonderful film. I had seen most of an edited version on my flight to Birmingham back in April, but it was new for Louise, and I enjoyed it a second time, without the redactions.

No sooner had I posted the blog and started the engine yesterday, than Angel went and threw up. This of course, right after we had the discussion between us about how well she was doing and that we were confident in leaving Tallahassee, before clicking "book now" on the Disney reservation site. We decided to press on regardless, because Orlando certainly has plenty of veterinarians, and one isolated barf among the many indicators of overall improvement did not really make for a crisis.

Fortunately, she made it through another night without throwing up, and she's been continuing to eat fairly normally, so we are hopeful that she is continuing to improve. In a few minutes we'll continue on to Fort Wilderness. I'm hoping we get assigned a site with enough gap in the trees to get online.

A mouse for an ailing cat

We are at the Walmart on the east side of Tallahassee (map), just ten miles from the Walmart on the west side (map) where we spent last night. We wanted to give Angel another day of observation before deciding to move along and away from the Northwood Animal Hospital. There are four Walmarts in town, and only one prohibits overnight parking -- the one closest to the vet, natch.

We had a nice dinner Friday night at the University Center Club, which is in Doak Campbell Stadium at FSU. We've been there enough times now that we know right where to park Odyssey, at the campus shuttle bus station near the stadium. After dinner it was only a short drive to the Walmart on the west side, a familiar stop for us (as is this one).

We spent most of the day in that lot, keeping tabs on Angel. She's actually eating now on her own, which is an excellent sign, although we are continuing with the subcutaneous fluids. By mid-afternoon we were pretty convinced she was on the mend and that we could leave town, but with this other store just a few miles away and on our route anyway, an extra night of insurance was an easy choice.

After another couple of meals and a return to her "normal" behaviors, which include supervising whenever either of us is in the kitchen, and waiting right by the front door, sometimes trying to dart out, whenever I walk the dog, we are now comfortable heading away from the latest vet. I spent this morning looking at maps.

We've already missed the annual Nordhavn open house in Stuart, which ended yesterday. So we will continue to slow-roll to that general area to look at whatever boats might be there whenever we arrive, and I am hoping by rolling slowly enough another couple of interesting boats might show up, at the end of the annual southward migration down the ICW. In the interim, we thought we might try to spend some time in Cocoa Beach, to catch up on the backlog of projects around the house.

Looking at the maps this morning I noted that we'd be going right through Orlando on the way to Cocoa Beach, and while it's only been a year since our last visit with the mouse, this is the cheapest time of the year at Fort Wilderness, and the holidays are always so festive there, even if you never enter a theme park. I just finished making a reservation for arrival tomorrow and departure on Friday, at a relative bargain of $64 per night for a full hookup site. We'll do our usual trick of spending all day Friday in the parking lot outside the campground, which will give us a full four days at Disney World.

There is no point in arriving at Fort Wilderness too far ahead of the afternoon check-in time, since sites are often not yet ready. So we'll have all this afternoon and most of tomorrow to get there, which will put us somewhere between Chiefland and Belleview tonight.

Conservative cat

We spent last night in the parking lot at the Northwood Animal Hospital (map). They had asked us to drop Angel off first thing this morning, but the closest parking spot is across town, and I did not relish the thought of trying to navigate the bus in rush hour traffic to a clinic where even getting into the parking lot was dicey. So we dropped by last night around 5 and asked if we could just park overnight, and they agreed. Getting into the tiny lot involved going through the parking lot of a sign shop next door, facilitated by the fact that they were already closed and the lot was empty.

After leaving Angel with the vet this morning, we had to clear out of the lot to make room for other customers, and so we headed to the Tallahassee Mall just a few blocks away, with its enormous lot. The mall is breathing its dying gasps, and already featured over at deadmalls.com (a site I frequent as we encounter dead malls around the country). As a side note, what looks like a shopping center on the satellite view across from the vet, a tempting place to park, was in fact Tallahassee's first enclosed mall, but, having died back in the 1980s, is now leased entirely to the State of Florida, which fills the lot to the brim.

When we pulled in to the mall lot we positioned ourselves in what looked like an unused part of the lot (map), near a long-vacant anchor store, but close enough to one of the working entrances that we could wander in and kill some time. We ended up spending a couple hours in the mall, including the half-hour call from the vet which I took sitting on a pleasant bench. We walked back the length of the mall to the bus to get ready to pick her up, and spotted an enormous line snaking around the mall from the Barnes & Noble, one of the few going concerns here.



What could this be, we asked ourselves? An incredible holiday deal on the Nook? Nope -- it turned out to be the book-signing tour for Glenn Beck. Apparently, he has a loyal following in Florida's capital. Of course the tour's Prevost entertainer coach was stationed outside the store (generator humming, even though this weather does not call for any air conditioning -- I don't think these entertainers have even a single operable window). The sea of cars belonging to conservative talking-head fans spread as far as the eye could see, engulfing Odyssey in what we thought to be a little-used part of the lot.



We got lucky -- the parking space immediately in front of Odyssey was vacant when we walked up, and I immediately put a couple of cones out to keep it that way while we packed up and ate our lunch. The lunchtime entertainment was watching the dumpster truck retrieve a dumpster for the Guitar Center store that had been positioned in the same general part of the lot, one of our clues that this part of the lot was unused. The onslaught of cars ended up blocking the lifting slots and he had a mighty struggle to retrieve it. Beck's coach pulled out just before we did, and we realized that we must have looked like part of the tour. Too bad we already gave away our Obama bobble-head that used to live on the dashboard.

We had to take our chances in the State of Florida lot to pick Angel up -- no way to get back into the vet's lot in the middle of the day. We got a few odd looks, but no one disturbed us for the half hour we were there. That was long enough to pick up the cat as well as another ream of paperwork for her file, plus some extra cat food, injection needles, and yet another prescription.

The ultrasound did not reveal any conclusive reason for the recent illness. Interestingly, one of her kidneys is less than half the size of the other one, which accounts for marginal numbers on some of the blood counts, but the complete set of tests seems to rule out kidney disease as the root cause here. There is some enlargement of the pancreas that may warrant some follow-up, but that would required a surgical biopsy, so we are holding off until we see how other treatments progress.

The new script is for Mirtazapine, which in humans is used to treat depression, but in cats is an appetite stimulant as well as an anti-emetic. They gave her one pill in the office, and the first thing she did when she got back to the bus was to eat a few dog kibbles -- the first food we have seen here eat voluntarily in over a week. Normally we would not let her eat dog food, but we are at the point where any nutrition is a good thing. We are going to continue with the antibiotics, since urinary or GI tract infections are one possible explanation for the symptoms, and increase the subcutaneous ringers to 100cc daily. If we don't see more improvement by mid-day tomorrow, we might stay right here in Tally so we can follow up with the same clinic.

In the meantime we'd already decided to spend at least tonight here, and so after we wrapped up at the vet we came here (map), to a coin laundry not far from our club in town. When the laundry's done, I made dinner reservations at the club, which is actually inside the university's football stadium. After dinner we'll trundle over to one of three convenient Walmarts here in town for the night.

On our way into town we had thought about dining at the club last night, but after securing permission to stay at the clinic we didn't want to then run around town. Instead we walked over to El Jalisco Mexican restaurant just a couple blocks away, and were surprised to find it jam-packed. The food was quite tasty and it was a friendly place, with half-price draft beer to boot, so it was a good choice.

Room with a view

We are parked at a roadside turnout on Cape San Blas (map), south of Port Saint Joe, Florida. This spot was listed in our Days End directory, and we figured if it did not work out for any reason, we could just continue another eight miles or so to the state park at the end of the peninsula, which has a $27 per night campground.

This turns out to be a great spot, with panoramic views of the gulf on one side, and Lighthouse Bayou off Saint Joseph Bay on the other. It's very remote here, and I saw more stars last night than I have in quite some time. There are no services for miles in either direction, and I grilled a nice steak last night for dinner.

Just before checkout time at Henderson Beach I called the vet, and the thyroid test had just come in. It was negative, which meant no return visit and no change in treatment plan. The next step, should things not improve, would be an ultrasound, and there are no ultrasound clinics in the Destin area. Thus wrapping up our Destin visit, we checked out of the campground and headed east on US98.

Making our way through Panama City turned out to be a slog. We're sorry they bulldozed the Elks lodge there last year, as it would have been a great stop, right on the water downtown. With no boondocking allowed anywhere in town, we did not even stop, and continued on to Port Saint Joe. This spot is a bit off the main route, requiring a short detour on Florida 30, but then it is only four miles from that scenic route.

We made it here right around 4:15, which would have given us just enough time to make the state park before closing if we needed it. But it seemed fine to us and we settled in for the night, enjoying a sunset over the gulf before dinner. Angel even seemed to be improving a bit, showing more alertness overall and mostly tolerating the food we were cramming into her.

Unfortunately, the off-label anti-emetic injection that the vet had given her wore off yesterday afternoon sometime, and just before midnight she managed to spit up a good amount of what we had given her, including some of the antibiotic pill. That suggests we need to go to the next step, and find an ultrasonographer to look into her abdomen.

As much as I'd like to stay on the coast a while longer, the next major city to the east is Tallahassee, where there are at least two veterinary ultrasound clinics. So we will turn inland at Apalachicola and head toward the capital, in the hopes of scoring an appointment sometime tomorrow. We also have a club in Tally, and perhaps we can have dinner there tonight.

Photo: The view from our windows over the Gulf of Mexico.