Tuesday August 30th 2022

Today’s weather was different. The day started a little brighter than the previous few, but it was still very humid and still. The difference was the timing on the rain. The forecast predicted rain to begin after 3PM which was very similar to the previous few days. They got it wrong. Around noon the sky darkened and the clouds opened up for a few minutes followed by an attempt to return to sunny conditions. It lasted for less than an hour before the pattern repeated. By the dinner hour the sun was reasserting its dominance. I think this is the first night I’ve been here with a true sunset.

The early arrival of the rain put a bit of a damper on my daily activity. I still managed to get out between the showers, but the rain made driving around difficult. Being in the car was still better than walking outside during the rain. The roads in Ocala are pretty much laid out in a grid. The streets and avenues are numbered and identified by the quadrants of NE, NW, SE and SW. The thing is they are not necessarily continuous. A particular numbered road might end in one area and pick up again miles away in another quadrant. Roads can be multi lanes wide at one place and turn into little more than a cart path a mile or two away. I found at least two roads today that dead ended. One ended at the entrance to a horse ranch and the other at a country club without any apparent warning.

Ocala isn’t as big a city as I thought. It only has a population around sixty thousand people. Gainesville, about thirty five miles north, has a population of more than twice as many people. The Villages, which is a retirement area about thirty miles south of Ocala also has more people at around eighty thousand people. Ocala is just a nice little city.