Friday May 21st 2021

It was mostly cloudy and threatening weather today. The temperature was fine in the low to mid eighties. Two or three times it got very dark and rained for a minute or more, but only got things damp not wet. It was an OK day.

It was lawn mowing day at the RV park. They got started around 9AM which is a much more acceptable time than many other places I’ve stayed. The noise and dust are still bad when you have open windows. I was tempted to shut the windows and turn on the AC, but as the summer heat approaches there will be plenty of time for that. The forecast for early next week calls for highs in the low nineties.

My day was a repeat of Thursday. I did a few chores around my RV home and caught up on my reading. On my walks about the RV park I watched the ducks in the retention pond. It’s interesting that some of little ducks are still staying with their parent while the others are all swimming around the pond and climbing the banks as a group. The large group of adolescent ducks don’t seem to have any adult duck supervision. It is a very different than the Canadian Geese I’ve watched other years. The geese stay with the family unit until they are full size birds. Both parents seem to maintain oversight all the time. These ducks remind me of a gang of juvenile delinquents.

All afternoon new guests arrived for the weekend at the RV park. The people that had left their RVs for the week returned. There is a little more activity in the park than earlier in the week.

Thursday May 20th 2021

It was nice not to have to worry about an impending power shutdown when I woke up this morning. I could roll over and go back to sleep if I wanted. That thought gave the day a very weekend atmosphere. Today’s dominate weather feature was the wind. A steady moderate wind blew from the east all day. Some of the gusts were much stronger. It kept the temperature under the clear sunny sky in the low to mid eighties.

The day was a real mismatch of activities. I did a few chores, ran a few errands, drove and walked around the RV park. It doesn’t really seem like I accomplished anything, but the day moved along quickly. Sunset was at 8:18PM and it was still light outside well after. Somehow summertime daylight savings hours are in full force and I hadn’t really notice yet.

The first few nights this week the park had a lot of vacancies. Tonight the park is closer to full. It may be the weekenders arriving early or just people starting to move before the weekend. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights have been the slowest at the last few commercial campgrounds I’ve stay at. It is a minor mental exercise trying to figure out the occupancy patterns of the parks I stay at. Strange, but it keeps me entertained.

Wednesday May 19th 2021

The electric update in the RV park continued this morning, but not as expected. Rather than turning the power off exactly at 8am, they waited until almost 8:45AM before shutting it down. It was back on around 9:30AM and off again around 10:30AM. Sometime after 11AM it came back on for good, but until the workers departed at 1PM I expected it to go off at any minute. The uncertainty made it worse in some ways than yesterday’s all day outage.

Today’s weather was more threatening than the previous few days. Bands of dark clouds started passing overhead in the late morning. The trend continued the rest of the day with a few light and brief showers. The current wind direction is bring in random storms off the Atlantic Ocean. All the weather really did was keep me close to my RV home most of the day. I kept busy with various chores around the rig.

While I was out walking around the campground I paused near the retention pond to visit with the turtles and ducks. The young ducks were on parade along the near bank of the pond. The adult ducks are around the bank of the pond, but for the most part the little ones seem to be on their own.

Tuesday May 18th 2021

Today was another nice May Florida day. It wasn’t too hot or humid. The mid eighties temperature with low to medium humidity was offset by a strong breeze. You couldn’t ask for a better day to spend without the comforts provided by electricity.

The city of Starke replaced two of the electric transformers in the RV Park. Tomorrow they finish the job. Promptly at 8am they shut the power down. It was turned on again around 5PM. About six guys in six trucks converged on the green ground based transformer cabinets. The first one took most of the morning and the second one the whole afternoon. I don’t think the crew was particularly happy about their task. There was a lot of yelling and I observed one guy take off his helmet and throw it on the ground while waving his arms and yelling. I think they have one more to do tomorrow, so the power shouldn’t be off as long.

The RV park didn’t do a very good job communicating about the outage. When I checked in last Thursday they didn’t mention it. Perhaps they were afraid of losing a customer or losing some income, but it would have been nice to know. I might have chosen to fill up my RV gasoline tank before setting up camp. My gas generator won’t run if my RV fuel tank is below a quarter tank. I had no options for electric power during the outage, particularly after my very week house batteries drained in about a half an hour. I really need to expedite a replacement.

I knew about the outage ahead of time from the notices I saw on the doors to various RV park buildings. They were posted before I took my first walk last Thursday. Many of the long term residents were caught by surprise by the outage. When they shut off the power this morning, I heard a lot of discussion about what was going on in the eerie quiet after the power went out.

Tomorrow I plan to take a drive or visit a park somewhere during the outage. I choose not to do that today, because I was waiting for a phone call between 12:45 and 2:45. It never came.

Monday May 17th 2021

The beautiful Florida May weather continues. The TV weather talkers call this low to mid eighties with fairly low humidity and not a lot of rain normal conditions for May in Florida. I can’t speak from personal experience. This is the latest date in May that I’ve been in the state. In 2019, my previous latest, I left the state for Baton Rouge Louisiana on May 17th.

I was out doing errands today. One was a stop at Walmart for a few groceries. I’m back in a pattern of more frequent stops for groceries than I’ve been doing for the past year during the pandemic. Today I put my mask to go in the store as per habit. Technically, as a fully vaccinated person I am no longer required to do so. Inside the store it was about fifty fifty masks vs. non masks. The one big difference was the push to get people vaccinated. There were little signs on the rows of groceries stating that the Walmart Pharmacy had COVID vaccine available for walk up vaccinations. The announcements on the PA system that used to mandate masks and social distancing were now ads for vaccinations. Something like: “Attention Walmart shoppers. The pharmacy has COVID vaccines available. Come and get your shot and you too can take off your mask.” I don’t know if they had any takers.

During one of my walks around the campground today, I noticed the pond that I labeled a Duck nursery is also a Turtle nursery. There were a number of small to medium size turtles along with the full size adults on the banks of the pond. They seemed to have staked out their own area on the bank. The duck families were in a different location.

Sunday May 16th 2021

Today’s weather was a clone of Saturday. The high was in the upper seventies with a northeast wind. There were a few clouds in the sky to hide the sun from time to time, but it was an overall nice day.

I slept with the bedroom windows open last night. It kept the room at a nice sleeping temperature, but it also let all the outside noises filter in. This RV park is situated near the major north south railroad corridor in the state. Some very loud and long trains pass along the tracks. During the day the noise gets absorbed into all the other noises, but at night it is the dominant noise. There are many grade crossings to the north of the park that the requires the train to sound its whistle. To the south of the park there are only a couple of crossings. That makes it easy to figure out which direction the train is going. You just need to figure out how long before the rumble of the passing train you hear the whistles start blowing. These facts are the result of a lot of study last night. For some reason I started listening and waiting for each new train rather than rolling over and going to sleep. There were three or four over the course of a couple of hours.

As a result of my late night studies this became a slumber Sunday. I slept a little later in the morning and nodded off for an hour during the afternoon. To a certain extent, trains fascinate me. I’ll have to guard against a similar study session tonight or it will become habitual.

This campground never really got into weekend mode. The last few parks have gone from quiet mid week places to very active and noisy places on the weekend. This park did fill up more, but with less active people. There were fewer families and more couples to go with the long term residents. Many of the long term residents seem to be workers in the area for a few weeks or months. It was quiet during the day on Thursday and Friday of last week. I expect it will be similarly quiet this coming week.

Saturday May 15th 2021

Today’s started cool in the sixties and slowly climbed into the mid seventies. There was a little more wind out of the north than Friday, but overall it was a very nice day.

On my walk around the RV park this morning I discovered a multitude of ducks. The retention pond at the back of the campground has turned into a duck nursery of sorts. There were many big and small families of ducks swimming in the water and napping on the banks. The pictures in this blog entry are all of the ducks in the pond.

I spent most of my day relaxing and working on travel plans for the summer. One thing I observed was the nightly prices seem to have gone up. The first places I check in a new area are the franchise campgrounds and the more heavily advertised places. Near tourist draws like Nashville some of these campgrounds want over one hundred dollars a night for sites that meet my RV configuration. Once I do a little more digging and find the less visible places that may be a little further away, the price comes down to a more reasonable number.

The other “gotcha” I’m seeing more is the campgrounds refusing to book a 30amp site to a class A motorhome. They are assuming that an RV built with 50amp service can’t survive on a 30amp site. Most of us know how to reduce our usage to avoid tripping a 30amp breaker. They use interesting excuses like “incompatible” or “fire danger”, but that’s what the breakers are there for. The reality is they want to make sure they fill the more expensive 50amp sites. It’s not the best idea plugging a 30amp RV into a 50amp line, but they’re willing to allow that practice. It could burn up the cord connecting the RV to the pedestal. It is reasonable to fill the 50amp sites with 50amp RVs before renting the 30amp sites to 50amp RVs. Just don’t get creative with the explanations.

My planning challenge continues to be finding places that I can stay longer near plenty of things to do. Weekends at popular tourist or recreational draws are already booked. The places that have weekend openings are designed for travelers and are usually near interstates further away from the things one would want to do. I know the longer I wait to book sites the worse it will get, but a lot of the longer stay issues have been around since I started looking at options in December and January. It’s not hopeless, just complicated.

Friday May 14th 2021

The temperature recovered from yesterday’s sixties into the mid seventies. It was nice comfortable day about ten degrees below the normal high for this date.

This was one of my usual lazy post travel days. My energy and enthusiasm level were low. I watched all of the morning TV news programs from bed, before dragging myself out of bed and starting the day. Breakfast and reviewing the news on the internet took the rest of the morning.

During the remainder of the day I finished setting up camp and took a couple of walks around the park. It hasn’t filled up for the weekend as much as I thought it would. Most of the RVs here are long term. Many are getting used as weekend retreats for people in the nearby cities of Gainesville and Jacksonville. It was quiet during the day, but toward evening there were more people around.

Thursday May 13th 2021

As has been the case recently it was a wet travel day. All morning long as I got ready to travel it rained lightly. Near the noon checkout as I was hooking up the car the light rain turned heavy. I was more than a little damp at the start of my journey.

The rain didn’t last long as I drove inland. Most of my hour and a half journey to Starke was in dry conditions. Other than the first few miles the entire trip was on state highways. When I arrived at the Starke Gainesville KOA it was apparent that the cold front had passed through. It was cold. During the rain in St. Augustine the temperature wasn’t too cool. During the mid afternoon in Starke it was barely over sixty degrees. Yesterday afternoon was around ninety. Today was thirty degrees cooler.

I’ll be here for eleven nights before I move on to catch up with the reservations I made for the Memorial Day holiday. This location is a compromise. A better location at one of the state parks was only available Sunday to Friday next week. If I took that reservation I would have had to move two more times and find two other places to stay. This is a nice campground. The only issue I have is the travel distance to the interesting things to do. This is my second stay here this year. The last time was at the end of February. There were a lot more people here then.

Wednesday May 12th 2021

The day began very sunny with very little breeze allowing the temperature to climb fast. It was around 90 degrees by mid afternoon when the thunderstorms arrived in the area. The worst of the storms were to the north of this location, but there was a good hour of wet weather.

I didn’t leave the RV park today. My car gas tank is only about a quarter full. The shutdown pipe line from Texas up the east coast has caused a run on gas in this area. Officials say that there is enough gas to go around if people followed there normal patterns, but that’s a level of trust it is hard to muster. The lines at the gas stations has resulted in many stations running out of gas. I decided not to push my luck and save the gas I have for important activities. The pipeline was re-energized this afternoon and the backlog should be cleared by the weekend.

This is my last full day in the St. Augustine area. I’m moving about sixty miles inland tomorrow. I have enough gas in the motorhome to make that move. As usual, I got many of the outside tasks completed this afternoon before the showers arrived. The pattern of moving on a rainy day seems to have returned. A cold front is passing through overnight and tomorrow is forecast to be a rainy day.