Thursday February 16th 2017

Tonight’s blog has several random thoughts. It’s very similar to my day of random tasks. It was a nice day in the mid 60s with lots of sunshine. I spent the early part of the day inside waiting on phone calls and email. When they finally came, it became clear that I would need to be in this area for a full business day next week. I want to get everything I can accomplished in my “home” state before I spend the next year in the western part of the country. Since Monday is a holiday, that means I need to stay around for Tuesday.

Some of the pieces of nature that have been falling from the trees onto my RV.

As I mentioned in a blog entry earlier in the week, finding a place to stay this weekend is a problem. It is a holiday weekend and it is the start of Speed Week in Daytona. The reservations I made earlier assumed I was on my way west this weekend. I needed to cancel those reservations and find a new place to stay closer to this area. Canceling one and moving another reservation was easy. It was not so easy booking new reservations nearby.

I checked the websites for several campgrounds south and west of Jacksonville. Not surprisingly, they all showed no vacancies for the weekend. I called two parks about 100 miles to the west of the city in the Interstate 75 corridor. The busy signal and failure to answer on the first couple of tries should have given me a hint. Once I made contact I was met with “I’m sorry we don’t have any sites available this weekend.” I went back to the directories and moved my search further north on Interstate 75. I finally found a site a little ways north of the Georgia line on I75. I stayed there in October when I was running from the hurricane.

I hope this struggle to find a place to stay is an artifact of the location and the situation. My desire is to stay at each place for two weeks with a limited amount of travel nights in between. If I can get into that mode after my month of March at one place in Arizona, I should be more comfortable. I just need to start making those two week reservations soon.

I also went grocery shopping at Walmart. I only bought a few things, but observed a transformation. Valentines Day is over and it’s time for Easter. When I was in the store on Tuesday all of the Valentine candy had already been removed from an entire row of shelves. Today that row was full of Easter Candy. Why is it that from October through April the stores push candy as a way to celebrate the holidays?  We don’t need candy for Memorial Day, Independence Day or Labor Day.  Apparently just for every other major holiday.

Back at the campground, I’ve prepared the outside of the RV to move tomorrow. The tanks are dumped, the sewer hose is stowed and the bicycle is loaded on the car. Inside I’ve emptied the sink of dishes and put a couple of appliances away. I’ve been here six nights, so a few more things than I’d like have remained out of their storage locations. Hopefully tomorrow morning will go smoothly.