Monday September 11th 2023

The heat and humidity made for an exhausting travel day. As with any travel day it had its challenges. The first started shortly after I pulled out of my site shortly before 11AM and finished at my arrival at Lake Manatee State Park around 3PM.

I had my first issue with dumping my Black holding tank when I stopped at the dumping station on the way out of the campground. After connecting up the dump hose and opening the valve nothing came out. Since there was no one waiting behind me and it was a quiet period, I got out a hose and connected it to the flush line. After about half an hour of flushing and dumping I got the tank partially emptied. The gauge still indicated more than a little in the tank. I added a few gallons of water to the tank before travel. My goal was to provide something to slosh around during my drive. When I arrived at my destination my first stop was the dump station to see if the holding tank constipation was cured by the water laxative during the drive. It seems to have been successful.

Traffic was heavy on Interstate 75, but probably not worse than normal. Once I was south of the Florida Turnpike the real heavy traffic near Ocala thinned out until I reached the intersection of Interstate 275 north of Tampa. Traffic the rest of the way was very heavy, but it never backed up. Even the bridge construction over the Manatee River north of Bradenton didn’t cause a backup today. The last eight miles of the journey on state road 64 wasn’t any better. I had to lock up the brakes to avoid one idiot driver. I’ll be finding displaced stuff inside the RV for the next few day. The bottom line is the drive took my full attention.

I finished setting up for my stay by 4PM. I’ll be here for two weeks assuming mother nature doesn’t send a hurricane this way. This deep in the Florida peninsular I’ll need to react and run from a hurricane quicker than in the northern part of the state. Currently there is nothing threatening this area in the pipeline.