Thursday February 23rd 2023

While the north is getting snow and ice this area of the south is having a mini heat wave. Today’s high was in the low nineties. The good thing is that the temperature still gets down into the high sixties overnight. The bad news is today was a moving day. It is never fun to move on a hot and humid day.

I departed the Big Cypress National Preserve just before the noon checkout. It is difficult to stretch it out to the last minute. Once you get started with travel preparation tasks it is hard to slow down. The problem was finding a place along the way to kill some time. I didn’t want to arrive at my destination before checkout time. Finding a place to park my 55 feet of motorhome and towed car is a challenge. Today I ended up making two U-turns while driving in an exaggerated oval before finding a place to hand out for a half an hour. Basically I killed half an hour driving and another half an hour parked at a roadside rest area on the wrong side of the road.

I arrived at Collier-Seminole State Park on the eastern approach along the Tamiami Trail to the Naples Florida area at 1:30PM. This is the park that didn’t reopen after hurricane Ian until January. I was concerned that I was going to have to find an alternative, but the park is OK for the most part. The older of the restroom buildings is still closed for repairs. The other two newer and elevated restroom buildings are open. One trail is also marked as closed. The campsites seem fine. I’ll check things out tomorrow.