Friday February 8th 2019

Today was the last great weather day of this set. The temperature reached new record highs in the area. It was in the mid eighties with bright sunshine and a little wind.

I moved north and east less then eighty miles today. I didn’t reserve the month of February in the popular areas last March. Finding a place to stay during the peak of snowbird season in Florida requires you to be away from the coast and the theme parks. The alternative is to go a little ways north in Florida or into southern Georgia. That’s exactly what I did. I’m in St. Mary’s Georgia at the Jacksonville North KOA for the next ten nights which includes the Presidents Day holiday. I’ve stayed at the park several times before. It is not to far from the coast, Jacksonville or the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. I’d like to take the ferry out to the Cumberland Island National Seashore, but the weather needs to cooperate.

Packing up this morning went without issue, but I wish I could say the same about hooking up the car. Today was one of those days that getting the tow bar to lock in place correctly was a challenge. The arms of the tow bar are supposed to extend and lock in as you pull straight forward. Today only one side locked in before I had to turn. I know from experience that turning before they are locked in is not a good idea, so I stopped to reset. Once I disconnected the car, I repositioned the RV and the car and tried again. The second time worked fine. It just added another twenty minutes to the departure schedule.

The drive was mostly on US routes. Only the last ten miles or less was on busy Interstate 95. The secondary routes were all lightly traveled good roads. I had to deal with a couple of construction areas, but there wasn’t much work going on today. Overall it was a good travel day.

Thursday February 7th 2019

The great weather continued today. The temperature reached the low 80s without much humidity and with only a little wind. The next cold front is expected to arrive tomorrow. It will drop the temperature almost twenty degrees by Saturday.

This is my last day at this campground in Starke Florida. I like the campground, but I really haven’t found anything in the area to keep me entertained. The long term residents of the campground must have found things to do, so I may have missed a few things.

The campground has about four types of residents. The first is a small number of full time residents. Most of them are in park model trailers around the outer perimeter of the park. The next group are the snowbirds down from the north for a few months in the winter. This park doesn’t seem to attract snowbirds from any one area like some. There are RVs from most of the states east of the Appalachians and some of the Midwest states. There doesn’t seem to be many Canadian Snowbirds at this park. A sub-group of these folks are the work campers that work at the park. This park seems to have a lot of them.

The third group is made up of Florida and Georgia residents that are using the park as their second homes. This group is primarily here on the weekend as an escape from the city. Not every Florida park has this kind of resident, but it is very common in other areas of the country. I suspect the proximity to the big city of Jacksonville is one reason. This park is only a forty to sixty mile drive from the various areas of Jacksonville.

The fourth group is the transient population like me. They are here for a night or two up to a couple of weeks. Those that are social animals (not me) integrate into some of the activities for the park residents that are dominated by the members of the first three groups. The organized activities are things like shuffleboard, horseshoe tournaments and bingo. My guess is those are what attracts the first three groups.

Wednesday February 6th 2019

As forecast today’s weather was a repeat of yesterday. It was dry and warm with very little wind. The temperature peaked right around eighty.

Similar to the weather my day was a repeat of yesterday too. It was a living in an RV kind of day. I didn’t do any traveling or touring, just some of life’s tasks. The only thing that made today different was a trip for groceries and gas. Less than a mile down the road is a Walmart with a full complement of groceries and a gas station. It is refereed to as a Super Center, but it really doesn’t have the floor space to have all the characteristics of other Walmart Super Centers. The variety of products to select from was compromised.

I filled my gas tank at $2.25 a gallon. That’s about thirty five cents higher than I paid at the beginning of January. A few cents of the difference is probably tax difference based on the county, but the rest is the cost of gas. It is still not a bad price, but if the twenty to thirty cent per month increases continues it won’t be long before the price is back to what I was experiencing two years ago. When you factor in regional variations I suspect it will be even higher out west.

Today was mowing day at the campground. A very loud and big lawn mower was used to cut the grass on each of the sites. I think they were using it more to vacuum up the leaves than to cut the already short grass. Many of the trees are dropping one set of leaves to get a start on the 2019 crop and the pine trees are starting to spread a fine yellow coat of pollen on everything. If their lawn mower vacuumed up the pollen it would be worth the noise pollution.

Tuesday February 5th 2019

It was a gorgeous weather day. The temperature flirted with eighty, the humidity was low and there wasn’t much wind. I had to switch back to warm weather clothes for the first time in a couple of weeks. Wednesday is forecast to be a weather clone. Let’s hope they got it right.

Today was another lazy day. I did a few chores around my RV home, but never ventured out in the car. This RV park is in the main route through the community of Starke Florida. It is surrounded by business. A strip mall with a Family Dollar and Bealls Outlet is next door. To get to any kind of nature area other than the town parks is a thirty mile or more drive. The attraction of the shopping mall is a short walk along a path that passes through a gate in the campground fence. I took that walk this afternoon.

Across US route 301 from the campground is one of the main north south train routes in the state. Every few hours during the day train whistles and the lumbering sound of freight cars drift into the campground. At night the train sounds seem to be even more frequent. Trains don’t bother me. I grew up near enough to a set of rails that I often heard trains at night. Trains and RV parks are often neighbors, so hearing trains on my rambling road trip is not unusual. In this case, my only lament is that I can’t see the trains that are passing.

Today seemed to be a departure day for many of the rigs in this park. The level of occupancy has been pretty much constant over the weekend. A few arrived and departed every day, but today a greater number of RVs departed than arrived. The campground has a healthy complement of snowbirds with a good number of transients, but the park isn’t full.

Monday February 4th 2019

Today’s weather started very similar to last Thursday and Friday. The cloudy and dry conditions were a big improvement from the weekend days, but still not activity inspiring. All that changed around 1PM. The sun made a full appearance for first time since the middle of last week. The temperature even climbed high enough to challenge the seventy degree threshold to warm.

I spent time today doing chores around the rig. It hasn’t been that long since my last cleaning session, but I found a cobweb in the corner of the bedroom floor. This motivated another cleaning session. I got the vacuum cleaner out of the basement and did all the floors. It takes longer to get the vacuum out and setup than it does to run it around all of the floor space. I still need to run the wet “mop” around the vinyl floor to pick up the rest of the dirt and clean it up a little.

The laundry was also on the list of things to do today. I checked the availability of machines in the laundry on each of two walks around the park. Both times there was a waiting line at the facility nearest my site. I could have driven to the other facility at the back of the campground, but there really isn’t a place to park. That’s probably why that laundry room had availability at one point this afternoon. I’ll get to the laundry before I leave here on Friday.

This campground doesn’t have any flowers for pictures to break up the text in this blog entry. Since I didn’t leave the park today I took pictures of my culinary masterpiece for lunch. I fried some onions and grilled a hamburger on my propane grill. It got supplemented with a couple of hash browns cooked in the convention oven. It wasn’t the most balanced meal, but it was good.

Sunday February 4th 2019

Either I don’t listen very well or the TV weather forecasters got it wrong. My guess is they were overly optimistic and being unfamiliar with their personalities I heard the wrong thing. It rained overnight and the day was foggy with drizzle and occasional rain showers. I expected it to start cloudy and end with a little sun. It wasn’t a very good day for anything outside.

I wasn’t prepared to watch endless Superbowl pregame TV or Cats and Dogs playing football, so I took a drive in the murky weather. Other than wasting a couple of hours it wasn’t very productive. I stopped at Lochloosa Lake. There were plenty of boat trailers at the boat launch, but the boats were hidden by the fog out on the lake. The lake is very popular for bass fishing.

As evening approach I got ready to watch the NFL Championship game. The game was very different from other Patriots appearances in the Superbowl. The stadium had more Patriots fans than Rams fans. It sounded like a Patriots home game. The other surprise was the low score and the winning margin. The Pats have never won a Superbowl by ten points before.

I wasn’t impressed with the coverage. The camera work by CBS seemed to experimental. They were using too many long overhead shots and didn’t seem to be keeping up with the pace of the game. Usually I pay attention to the commercials. Tonight I didn’t seem to remember to watch the commercials. I’m sure I’ll see them many times in the days ahead. Those that don’t appear on TV again will be all over the Internet.

Saturday February 2nd 2019

It rained overnight, but I thought it was going to be a dry cloudy day. I was wrong. Today was a random rain day. It went from bright but cloudy to dark and rainy without a moments warning. I had to hurry and cover things up from the rain more than once today.

While I was hiding out inside during the rain showers I was considering this blog. I am starting on my forth year of daily blog writing. It remains a good tool for me to record my activities, thoughts and plans. Most significantly it provides some structure to my rambling life style. The knowledge that I have to write something at the end of each day makes for a more enriched day. As I’m going through the day I think about what I can take a picture of and the things I can write about.

Going back and reading some of the old entries points to a couple of issues. First I could do a better job of editing. I’ve found several cases of half changed approaches for describing things not to mention a tendency of changing tense and voice mid paragraph. I may look into one of the online grammar checking programs.

The other issue is finding specific articles in the three plus years of postings. I haven’t been very good about tagging articles with keywords and the theme I’m using doesn’t organize the articles as well as it could. A finer granularity than a month would be better. I’m going to look into other themes. At the least I’m going to update the banner graphics in the next few days. I just have to figure out what picture I want to use.

Tomorrow is the NFL Championship game. I don’t know how much of the pregame garbage TV I can take, but I’ll be watching the game. GO Patriots!

Friday February 1st 2019

I left Lake Louisa State Park in Clermont Florida heading north at 11:30AM. It was a good weather day for travel. There wasn’t much wind and the sun was behind a layer of clouds. I prefer the conditions that don’t require wearing sunglasses. With sunglasses on the rear view monitor, dashboard, GPS and radio are much harder to see.

The 130 mile trip north was on US highways, not interstates. The first half of the trip through Clermont, Leesburg, The Villages and Ocala took a lot of active driving. Most sections of the road averaged three to four traffic lights per mile. Only a few sections were free of traffic lights. Stopping and starting a big RV takes planning. When I see a light ahead it becomes a judgment call as to how much I need to slow down. If I get it wrong I have to stop hard or pass through a yellow light. Stopping hard really messes things up inside. I managed not to have any hard stops today and only went through one yellow. The way you accomplish that is to go slow most of the time. I’m sure some of the surrounding traffic wasn’t pleased with my pace. I didn’t enjoy all the lights I had to stop at.

After Ocala the route becomes more rural. The speed limit was sixty five between towns and slows rapidly to forty five or even thirty five in the towns. This stretch of road used to have a reputation as the speed trap capital of the Florida. I don’t know if that’s still the case, but I was careful none the less.

I arrived at my destination for the next week between two thirty and three. It was after three thirty before I was finished checking in and setting up. I’m at the Starke/Gainesville NE KOA. I stayed here about this same time of year in 2017. After nine weeks in state parks, it is a change of pace to be back in a full service RV park.