Friday February 23rd 2024

Today was a warm, windy day with rain thrown in at inopportune times. Wouldn’t you know it, it was a travel day. The first bout of rain lasted about half an hour while I was packing for travel this morning. I was able to work on inside tasks during the majority of the shower and stayed dry. The second and biggest rain shower was late in the afternoon after I was already setup at my new location. The wind was the biggest problem during my travel today. The sustained winds were more then 20mph out of the southwest with gusts well above. Whenever I was driving through open areas it was a two hands on the wheel exercise.

I departed the Starke KOA just before the 11AM checkout. My destination was the Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park. It is only about a thirty mile trip including a drive through the outskirts of Gainesville. I arrived well before the 1PM checkout time for campers in the state park. The gate ranger allowed me in, but asked me to wait in one of the parking lots until after 1PM.

Since I am familiar with the park from previous visits I chose to wait in the overflow parking lot near the campground. I usually unhook my car there anyways. Once I pulled in and got the car disconnected, I walked to and around the campground. My site and most of them for that matter were all empty. By the time I finished my walk around the camping loop and returned to my waiting motorhome it was 1PM. I was on my site shortly after that. Of course, I still had to walk back to the overflow parking area for my car.

I am on the same site I was on in January of 2023. It is a nice site in a decent location. The only down side is that I don’t have clear access to the sky for my satellite TV. I knew that was likely since it didn’t work last year either. Getting a satellite signal through the trees in this campground is pure luck. It is full of tall trees. I’ll just have to live with over the air TV for a couple of weeks.

Thursday February 22nd 2024

Today started out just as cold as the last couple of days, but the thermometers say it warmed up a little more. The high temperature was in the low to mid seventies. For some reason it felt colder than yesterdays mid sixties to me. Must be confused expectations or something.

I was a little more active today than yesterday. In addition to my daily walks around the campground and surrounding area, I accomplished a few domestic chores. The campground laundry rooms were functional again allowing me to create some clean clothes. I should have washed some bedding and towels, but they will have to wait for another time. Inside my RV home, I got a little more complex cooking accomplished. I roasted a piece of pork loin for dinner today and subsequent meals. It makes good leftovers and sandwich meat going forward for a few days.

The campground seems to be full tonight. This must be the day that was causing my initial attempts to reserve my stay to be indicated as full. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights all had several empty sites. The fact that I got a cancellation has always been clear. I’m not complaining. I got lucky. Trying to figure out booking patterns and campground policies is a fun mystery for me to try and follow.

I am moving on tomorrow. It is only a short twenty five to thirty mile drive. My next stop will be longer and back in my two week state park stay mode. The issue is the inconsistent checkout times. I need to be out of here by 11AM, but my destination has a checkout at 1PM. It is very possible that I will arrive before my site is empty. Often I will kill time along the way in a rest area or some place similar. For this journey, I don’t know of a good stopping place.

Wednesday February 21st 2024

It was another Florida cold start to the day. The inside temperature shortly after sunrise was 48 degrees. I turned on some heat and went back under the covers to stay warm. There was a little more wind today than the day before. Still, the temperature managed to reach the mid sixties under a blue sky completely devoide of clouds all day.

I planned for today to be a “Do Nothing Kind of Day”. It pretty much went to plan. I did some reading in between walks around the campground and the neighboring areas. This campground has a lot of snowbirds from the northeast and a few from the northern midwest. I don’t really understand the attraction of this area. There isn’t a lot of recreation or tourist type locations nearby. One possible explanation is directly related to the location. The cost of a site at this park is far more reasonable than the rates at parks in popular areas.

I checked on the progress of the laundry facility updates. It looks like they finished up changing out the machines today. The machines didn’t look any different than I remember from previous visits, but I saw them getting taken out of their boxes. So, I know they are new. I should be able to get the laundry done tomorrow.

As I am writing this blog entry, the temperature is already dropping. I had to add a layer and turn up the heat before I typed the last paragraph. The forecast calls for another overnight in the thirties.

Tuesday February 20th 2024

It was 47 degrees inside this morning when I rolled out of bed for the first time. The TV reported the outside overnight lows were in the upper thirties. Once the sun rose in above the horizon it brought the temperature into the mid sixties. Tonight the low is forecast to drop to similar levels.

I had two things planned for today. They were both put off because of the weekend rain. One was grocery shopping and the other was laundry. My knowledge of this campground and the area from previous visits lead me to believe the tasks would be easier here. Right now, maybe not. They are in the process of replacing all of the washers and dryers in both of the laundry facilities at the campgound. This morning a large box truck arrived with new machines. The old ones were brought out and new ones were installed. As of the end of the day, all of the machines have been swapped. I don’t think they are hooked up yet. Hopefully I’ll be able to do a load or two before I leave on Friday. My next stop doesn’t have a laundry facility.

The grocery shopping was successful, but disappointing. I managed to get everything I really needed. In several cases I needed to alter my choice to accommodate low inventory. Usually that meant buying a name brand rather than the store brand. In a couple of other cases I took the last of a product on the shelf. The issue is the size of the store. While it is a full service grocery store, it only has room for less stock on the shelves and fewer selections of size. For example, at bigger Walmart, cold cereal is spread out over one and a half sides of an aisle. At this Walmart the cereal only spanned about three quarters of a side of the aisle. On a positive side it wasn’t very busy in the afternoon.

From the difficulty I had getting a reservation at this campground for four nights this week, I expected it to be very full. I wasn’t surprised that there were a few empty sites last night, but there are even more openings tonight. My guess is that one of the next two nights the park will be full. There are snowbirds occupying most of the sites. It is much louder, party oriented group than I’m used to seeing here.

Monday February 19th 2024

The two days of rain came to an end overnight. This morning started cloudy, but the sun made an appearance long before noon. It turned into a nice day with cooler than normal temperatures. As the day went by a north wind joined the weather mix.

The weather wasn’t ideal for travel, but it was better than a rainy travel day. My ideal travel day is cloudy without rain and no real wind. I had less than 130 miles to travel today. That is an easy distance on the interstate. Unfortunately the interstate isn’t a viable option for traveling from the Clermont area to Starke Florida northeast of Gainesville. My chosen route for this often driven route is north on US27 to US301. Several years ago it was an easy drive through several cities with long stretches of empty space between them. Now, the cities are bigger and the space between the cities has filled in with housing and businesses until you get north of Ocala. Two thirds of the journey is in traffic with signal lights every few hundred yards. Probably the worst part is through the Villages massive complex of 55plus housing.

Today I departed Lake Louisa State Park just before the 1PM checkout time. I arrived at the KOA in Starke Florida a little after 4PM. This tends to be one of my fall back locations to fill in a gap in my state park reservations. Initially even this park wasn’t available when I checked last fall, but it became available a couple of weeks ago. This has been a difficult winter to find reasonable places to stay. The twenty six nights I’ve needed to stay in commercial parks this winter has cost almost as much as much as the fourteen weeks in state parks. Of course, I’ve chosen the commercial parks by convenience and entertainment value rather than cost, so I can’t complain. Commercial campground costs have gone up in cost substantially, while the public parks haven’t gone up quite as much.

I’ll be here until Friday. I don’t anticipate doing much other than some grocery shopping and some walking in the neighborhood. This campground is located in the business district within walking distance of downtown.

Sunday February 18th 2024

The operative word for the day continues to be “Rain”. Since the rain began in the early hours of Saturday morning, it hasn’t let up. This is the longest period of continuous rain I’ve experienced in a long time. It is not unusual to have several rainy days in a row, but there are generally periods of intermittent rain during that period. In thus case there have been no let ups in the light to medium rain. An occasional wave of heavy rain has also happened. The only thing we haven’t had is thunderstorm level downpours.

Once again I spent the day inside watching TV and surfing the internet. I considered making a grocery run, but it just didn’t reach the level of urgency necessary to battle the traffic in the rain. My only venture outside was brief. I bundled up in rain gear long enough to take a couple of pictures to illustrate just how wet the outside world was during the afternoon. On the plus side, the rain managed to wash all the ugly yellow green pollen off my car.

This is my last full day at Lake Louisa State Park. Tomorrow I’m moving a hundred and twenty five miles north. Going north right after a weather front passes through the area practically guaranties a few cold nights to come. I’ll be in a commercial campground for four nights before my next state park reservation starts. The Walmart is half a mile down the street, so my grocery shopping will be easy on Tuesday. What else I’ll do during my stay remains to be seen.

Saturday February 17th 2024

All week the weather people have been forecasting rain this weekend. Early in the week the rain was predicted for Sunday into Monday. Multiple inches of rain were forecast. The Dayton 500 NASCAR race Sunday afternoon was clearly in jeopardy. As the week went by the start time for the precipitation kept getting earlier. As of Friday, the rain was predicted to start Saturday afternoon and possible be over by the time the race was scheduled on Sunday. This morning at 7AM the true became apparent. It was already raining. The current forecast calls for rain through Monday morning.

I have pretty much stayed inside all day. At one point, I hadn’t heard any rain on the roof for about an hour so I ventured out for a walk. It is a good thing I put my rain coat on, because it really was raining. One might call it a heavy mist, but my rain coat was soaked within a couple of minutes. That is as long as I lasted outside in the rain.

Most of my day was spent in front of some form of electronics. Surfing the internet from my phone got most of the time, but my tablet and laptop got their share of time after I ran the phone battery down. Of course the TV also didn’t get neglected. It served as background noise most of the day. The pictures in this blog entry are the flower blossoms I captured yesterday at Animal Kingdom.

Friday February 16th 2024

Today started cloudy similar to yesterday, but the sky cleared more rapidly. By late morning the sun was shining bright. The high temperature for the day was a little higher than Thursday peaking near eighty.

I took my last trip to Disney for six to eight weeks today. My plan was to start at Disney’s Animal Kingdom then hop to Magic Kingdom later in the day. The heavy crowds I found at Animal Kingdom changed my plans. There seemed to be more people there than I’ve seen before. Wait times for the rides were all long, but more indicative of the high crowds were the various animal trails. Usually it is a rather leisurely walk along the trails with only a couple of people at the animal viewing areas. Today there was a line of people on the walkways and the people stood two or three deep at the viewing areas. The bottom line is it took much longer to see the things I wanted to see. I didn’t have the energy to park hop to Magic Kingdom. The My Disney Experience App showed wait times there were even longer than Animal Kingdom.

Despite the crowds I managed to see many animals. I walked all of the animal trails and all of the main park walkways. Overall I made two loops of the park as I waited for the wait time for the Kilimanjaro Safari ride to get reasonable. Standing in a slow moving congested line for a long time is something I try to avoid. I can only play with my phone for entertain so long, before I get board. The wait time was ninety minutes for most of the afternoon. Just before the ride closed at 5:30, the wait time went down to forty minutes. It turned out to be about half an hour.

I managed to get on the ride without a long wait. The late ride time made some of the species of animals more visible, but others like the giraffes and zebras were already behind the scenes. I hoped to see the new baby elephant. Disney let her and her mother out from the behind the scenes area for the first time yesterday. I’ll have to be happy with the local media coverage. She was not out during my safari.

One of the things I did while waiting for the Safari wait times to come down was the bird show. I watched it for the first tine in a long time. I only remembered tiny parts of the show. Similar to other animal shows the hosts try to be comedians and ecology preachers at the same time. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. The birds were great.

A little after 6PM I called it a day. Instead of heading for Magic Kingdom, I pointed my car in the direction of my RV home. Traffic wasn’t kind to me. For the first couple of miles I spent more time stopped than moving.

Thursday February 15th 2024

The sun was very slow in making an appearance today. The day began with a thick cloud layer as the day progressed a few openings allowed the blue sky to be visible, but the sun didn’t find the openings until late in the afternoon. By sunset only a few clouds remained. The temperature managed to climb into the mid seventies with the help of a very light breeze out of the south.

The campground at Lake Louisa State park is near the southeast corner of the park. It is a long way from Lake Louisa which forms the northern boarder of the park. Today I drove to the beach area on Lake Louisa. There are more hiking trails in this area. I walked a trail along the lake shore and another one inland around another much smaller body of water. Turtles, alligators and water birds still remain allusive. In the week and a half I’ve been here, I’ve only seen one egret along the side of Dixie Lake. All of the places I’m used to seeing gators and turtles taking the sun have been empty. It is a mystery to me.

There was no one using the water part of the beach today. A couple of people were sitting on the sand, but the sun wasn’t out to consider it sunbathing. A couple of families were having picnics and the kids were using the playground. I just walked across the beach and out the cypress tree lined trail along the side of the lake. A few wildflower blossoms drew the attention of my camera.

The campground has started its transition to weekend mode. It looks like people are trying to get a head start on the long weekend. Several tent campers and tent trailer campers arrived this afternoon. Some of the trailers that arrived also did a lot more setup than is usual for an overnight stay, so I expect they are here for the weekend as well. It is unfortunate that the weather forecast for the weekend calls for a couple of inches of rain on Saturday and Sunday. The local TV weather talkers are spreading fear that Sunday afternoons Daytona 500 race will be rained out.

Wednesday February 14th 2024

I finished editing the pictures and writing yesterday’s blog after midnight. That isn’t that unusual, but I also forgot to set the publication time stamp back to Tuesday. I don’t often make that mistake. Even after finishing the blog entry, I wasn’t ready for bed. The night got later as the TV programs got less interesting. Eventually I went to bed and slept normally.

All that seems to have set the stage for a lost day. I got up only a few minutes later than normal, but I didn’t really get started with the day. Rather than starting my morning coffee and gathering some food for breakfast, I sat in front of the TV and zoned out. I didn’t sleep, but I couldn’t tell you anything about the programs on the TV. The bottom line is breakfast turned into lunch.

Most of the half dozen things I was thinking about doing today never surfaced in my thoughts until I sat down to write this blog entry. Instead around 3PM I walked around the campground for the first time today. The mix of out of state license plates has a new twist today. The number of Ontario and Quebec plates has gone up. They easily represent the highest concentration other than Florida plates. I haven’t seen as many Canadian plates on cars out on the roads as normal, but I guess they around in places I’m not looking.

My second walk of the day was to observe and photograph the sunset. There was the right mix of clouds and moisture in the air to make a nice sunset. Hopefully I’ll have a more active and productive day tomorrow.