Monday May 13th 2019

Today was a travel day. I only had about forty miles to travel to Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park south of Gainesville Fl. Since the state park checkout time is 1PM, I didn’t want to arrive early. Waiting for someone else to vacate the site they legally posses until the checkout time could be rude and is certainly inconvenient. I stopped at a rest area on Interstate 75 for a few minutes so I arrived after 1PM.

Today was also a day filled with thunderstorms. The first one passed through around 9AM. I worked on getting the inside of the RV ready to travel while it rained outside. The sun was back out by 10AM giving me plenty of time to be ready to leave by the 11AM checkout time. On the drive south I dodged a few thunderstorms. The dark clouds passed by to the west dropping only a few random rain drops along my path. My luck changed a little after I killed time at the rest area. A storm passed across the highway in front of my path. As I got closer to my destination I caught up with the storm for a couple of minutes. It had passed by to the east by the time I got to the state park.

I setup on a very wet site in very humid conditions. It wasn’t raining and the temperature was only in the low eighties, but I was dripping with sweat from the humidity. Shortly after I was through setting up another thunderstorm arrived. It only lasted a half an hour, but everything got wet again. By late afternoon the sun was back out and the storms were gone. The cold front still hasn’t had an impact on the humidity yet, but it is dry.

I was in this state park for almost two weeks at the end of February. This stay is only three nights, but I look forward to enjoying the park again. I don’t have time to take any of the long hikes to see the American Bison heard, but I’ll visit the observation tower a time or two. This park has the right mix of wildlife and nature to keep me happy after several weeks in structured RV parks.

Sunday May 12th 2019

It was a cloudy humid day with a few passing showers. Without full sun, the temperature only got into the mid eighties. Tonight and tomorrow the rain is forecast to get more wide spread.

I tried to get a few errands accomplished today, but found more places closed then I expected. In this area many of the non chain stores are closed on Sunday. I’ve gotten used to urban and resort areas where everything seems to be open on Sundays. In the abstract I’m in favor of places closing on Sunday, but when I want something it is nice when they’re open.

Before things outside got to wet, I packed a lot of things away. I’m moving tomorrow so I began the travel preparation process. The gas grill is stored away and the bicycle has been loaded onto its carrier on the back of the car. I also took the time to dump and flush the holding tanks. I don’t flush the black tank every time I dump, but it’s good to do it often to prevent solids from building up in the tank. I probably not going to get another opportunity to flush the tank for another week or so.

Tomorrow I’m moving less than forty miles to a state park. It’s more my kind of campground and is also a bit cheaper, but is hard to get reservations on short notice. I was able to get three nights. It’s closer to Gainesville so I’ll be able to finish up some of the things I need to complete before I head out on my summer travels. As of now, I plan to start west on Thursday.

Saturday May 11th 2019

I’m not sure where the week went. If it wasn’t for the different morning TV programs, I wouldn’t have realize this was Saturday. Each day this week has blended in with the last. Today’s temperature was a little higher. It peaked in the low nineties, but a good breeze and some cloud cover allowed it to be comfortable. We even had one two minute rain shower.

The campground had a yard sale from 9AM – 1PM that was open to the public. The residents were encouraged to have a table up near the main road to sell their accumulated “junk”. I believe the profits were shared with charity somehow. It didn’t seem to be very well supported. I only saw about four tables setup from my long distance vantage point. There may have been more. I didn’t visit the sale since I’m trying to get rid of stuff not acquire more.

In between baseball and golf watching on TV, I was back in travel planning mode today. The current challenge is selecting places to stay that balance length of stay, availability and plenty of things to see and do in the area. Ideally I would like to stay a week or two in a given location. The complication is that I’ve waited too long to make reservations to get long stays in popular locations. I end up having to break up may stay at different places in the same general area. Right now I’m moving south along the I-5 corridor in Oregon during July and north along the coast in August, before returning over the Cascades to the east in the first half of September. The second half of September into October I’ll move south through the high desert to Reno for a couple of weeks. Hopefully I won’t be at altitude when the snow starts to arrive. With that outline in mind, I’m working from both ends making plans. I anticipate spending the winter in Las Vegas similar to two years ago.

Friday May 10th 2019

It was a little more humid and a little warmer today. The forecast thunderstorms didn’t happen. The front that is dumping rain on the Houston TX area isn’t moving as fast as anticipated. The forecast now calls for an increasing chance of thunderstorms each day with the front likely to pass over the area Sunday night or Monday. The forecast daily high temperature is also moving up into the above normal range in the low nineties.

I got a slow start this morning. It was the lunch hour before I was ready to open the door to the outside world. By then it was too warm outside in the sun to get much done. Instead I set out in the car with no particular destination in mind. I traveled about sixty miles in a loop to the southeast of the campground. It was a nice drive but I can’t say I saw anything memorable. There were a few small towns, lots of trees and a few bodies of water that looked pretty swampy.

Despite my skepticism yesterday the campground has filled up quite a bit for the weekend. A steady stream of rigs arrived all afternoon. The campground even has an event planned for Mothers Day. When I walked around this evening, most of the empty sites were recently occupied by long term residents. My guess is the sites are still paid for or haven’t been put back on the available list.

Thursday May 9th 2019

It was another great weather day very similar to the last few. The forecast had a higher chance of afternoon thundershowers, but they didn’t materialize. Tomorrow the chance of afternoon showers increases.

I spent most of the day working on getting things ready for my summertime travel. So far I’m doing far more rearranging stuff than eliminating junk. That would be OK if I’m only rearranging the stuff that I really need. I still have too much of the “it might come in handy” thought process to be as ruthless as I should be. The proper approach would be get rid of anything I haven’t used in the last year.

The campground doesn’t seem to be filling up for the weekend as fast as the last couple of weekends. The last two Thursday nights more sites were full and most of them stayed for the weekend. This doesn’t strike me as a destination park for people from the area. Unless you have business in the community there isn’t a lot of things to draw you to the area. It’s a good place for Snowbirds that don’t want to go deep into the state and it is very good for travelers on US 301 cutting diagonally across the state from the I-95 east coast to the I-75 west coast route.

The nearby trains may bother some people. Many trains pass by every day. You can’t see them from the campground, but you can hear them. The sounds of train whistles as they approach and cross various roads is easy to hear. The actual rumble of the wheels on the rails can also be heard most of the time. Based on sound there are some long trains going by. I haven’t seen any trains in this area. I have seen long trains on the same track both north and south of town. There is a big rail yard north of hear near the intersection of US 301 with Interstate 10. Two trains have passed by as I’ve been writing this blog post.

Wednesday May 8th 2019

The good weather continues. Today was another day with a high temperature in the upper half of the eighties and low humidity. The only difference from the last couple of days was a strong breeze that kept the outside temperature comfortable.

I probably should have opened some windows and allowed the breeze to keep the inside of the RV comfortable too, but I switched into AC mode this past weekend. I’ve been keeping the RV windows shut and the AC on during the day. At night the AC is off and bedroom windows are open. I know I’ll have to be in AC mode as I travel west into the desert areas between the mountain ranges, so I might as well get used to it. The adjustment primarily impacts my sinuses. I get a little congested moving between the blowing cold AC air and the non AC space until I get used to it. My box of Kleenex has gone from full to nearly empty over the last few days. This is routine for me and I’m already starting to adapt.

On the getting ready to travel front, I worked on sorting through another couple of basement storage bins. This time I’m committing to getting rid of a few things I’ve been dragging around the country with me for the last three plus years. I’m not sure why I had a large plastic bag with several pairs of old shoes with me. Some of them date back to the late nineties. Either I was supposed to take them to Goodwill when I was cleaning out my house, or I was feeling overly sentimental about old shoes. Either way they’re going to Goodwill or the dumpster now.

Right now, I’m targeting a departure from this area a week from today. I’m only booked here until Monday, so I’ll either have to extend or move to a different campground for a couple of nights. I’m trying to plan my departure so I can travel through the Dallas TX area on a Sunday. Leaving a day later I can still make the Sunday in Dallas, but I’ll have longer travel days.

Tuesday May 7th 2019

Today turned into a grocery shopping day. I really only needed a few things, but that makes the task harder. There is only so much room to store food in my RV. I have to resist the impulse buy or the urge to stock up on common items. I have to be careful to only replace what I use. If I want to try something new I need to consider the storage issue. Surprisingly, the place I have the most available space is in the refrigerator. My motorhome has a full size residential refrigerator instead of an RV specific unit. As long as I don’t keep a lot of never going to be used leftovers I have lots of room in the frig for things that don’t mind the cold like bread, pastries and similar things.

I’m not sure I succeeded in not over buying. I came home with a lot more than the few things I needed when I went in the Walmart door. The good news is everything found a home in the RV. I don’t have extra stuff sitting on the counter. This was my last shopping trip for a fixed location in a while. Next week I start my summer travels. Until I stop at one place for more than three or four days I won’t be getting the gas grill out or doing a lot of cooking. Most of my meals will be sandwiches and simple things. After a long day of travel the last thing I want to do is cook an elaborate meal. When I’m really tired, I have a few frozen dinners in the freezer. My next visit to the grocery store will be to make sure I have the food items I need for traveling. That includes snacks to eat while I’m driving or stuck in traffic.

Most of my focus over the next few days is going to be on getting ready to travel. I need to make sure the basement storage bins are not over loaded and are organized for travel. Things tend to accumulate without you realizing it. Getting rid of excess stuff means getting rid of weight. Less weight generally means better handling and better fuel mileage for the motorhome. I have to be ready to hit the road by the end of next week, but if I can, I’d like to leave earlier.

Monday May 6th 2019

Yesterday’s rain storms changed the humidity level from oppressive to nice. Today’s temperature is still high around ninety under a sunny sky, but for the next few days the humidity is forecast to be low. The lightening forecast returns for the weekend which means humidity.

Last year I left Florida the last week of April. As I moved north the weather conditions deteriorated quickly. It got to be very rainy in Tennessee, Kentucky and Indiana. This year I’ve chosen to remain in Florida a few weeks longer to allow all the rain storms moving across the country to stabilize a little. I’m not sure that I’ll be successful. This year my westward journey will start toward the end of next week. I may be dodging severe weather in the portion of Tornado Alley I pass through in Texas. The other observation is that the Florida weather is getting warmer than I remember from last year.

Today I took a drive south to the Ocala area. I stopped at a State Forrest recreation area along the way. The sides of the road out to a fishing area on a lake were lined with purple blossoms. It was very spring like and pretty. Another positive sign of the season was a very large U-Pick Blueberry patch along route 301. A negative sign of the season was all the bugs on the my windshield and front grill of my car at the end of the trip. I didn’t see any swarms as I was driving, but I must have driven through a couple.

Sunday May 5th 2019

The sun near seemed to rise this morning. It was dark and cloudy when I got up and it got darker as the morning went by. Shortly before 11AM the sound of thunder was in the air. By the top of the hour a full blown storm was upon the area. It rained hard for the next three hours before it let up for a little while. After another round of rain the sky started to brighten around four thirty.

I didn’t get out of the RV at all today. By the time it was dry enough to get some exercise walking in the campground, I was settled into my internet based research on my summer travels. Progress is slow when I’m not focused. Every little link to an interesting topic gets followed. I read more articles about whale migration off the coast than I did about possible campgrounds on the Oregon coast. I have to keep reminding myself that the longer I wait the harder it will be to find space.

Saturday May 4th 2019

I don’t know if the weather forecasters got today’s weather right or wrong. It turned out to be a more stable day than yesterday, but it was warmer and still humid. The TV weather forecasters weren’t getting any time on the news to provide a real forecast. All of the TV time was caught up in coverage of the 737 jet that went off the runway at Jacksonville NAS into the St Johns river. No humans died and only a three year old child was hospitalized. The TV stations all mobilized and interrupted programming into the late night and again this morning. The TV crews seemed to be unable to believe that no one was killed. They seemed disappointed they weren’t covering a bigger disaster. This morning, when it was learned that peoples pets in the baggage area probably died, the TV crews finally had something to talk about.

How should you look at it; the passengers are lucky they only went off the runway into a few feet of water and no one was seriously injured or the passengers were unlucky to be landing in a thunderstorm and going off the end of the runway. Neither is very positive, but watching the TV coverage I had another thought. The TV announcers were thinking; I’m unlucky that my opportunity at covering a major disaster is a fizzle.

Today was my second lazy day in a row. I spent most of the day researching my summer travels. I’ve decided on my route once I cross the Cascades. I’m going to spend two to three weeks going down the Interstate 5 corridor between the Cascades and the Coastal Range. I’ll make day trips into the western slope of the Cascades and the eastern Coastal Range. At Grants Pass I’ll head for the Coast and return north along the Oregon coast to Astoria. Finding places to reserve will be a challenge. The coast is very popular, but by pushing some of my dates into August may give me a better chance. From Astoria I’ll turn back east and cross back over the Cascades then turn south along the eastern slope of the range. All of this is subject to change if I find extreme difficulty with reservations.