Thursday September 7th 2023

The bright sunny and dry weather seems to be coming to and end along with my stay here at the Eastbank campground on Lake Seminole. It was overcast this morning followed by sun most of the afternoon. As the sunset a thunderstorm moved into the area from the east. The forecast is for more rain overnight into the morning. It is arriving just in time for moving day.

This is my last full day here for this visit. There isn’t a lot to do in the area or at the park, but I really enjoy my stays here. The I’ve been here for a two week stay each year since 2020. The first year and this year each had a few days away in the middle of the stay because of weather.

The first half of my day was lazy. I lingered over my breakfast coffee and muffins. Eventually I got motivated to take my first walk of the day around the campground. Only a few RVs departed today. I suspect people are arriving for the weekend. There were a few new RVs on my second and third walks of the day. The third walk was as daylight was waning to watch my last sunset across Lake Seminole for this visit.

I have completed all of the outside travel preparation that I can do ahead of time. That way I don’t have a lot to do outside in the morning should it be raining. My goal is to leave around 10:30 or 11AM. I have about 230 miles to Ocala. It will likely take around 4 hours.

Wednesday September 6th 2023

The nice weather trend continued. With only a medium humidity and a light breeze the temperature climbed into the low nineties under a mostly sunny sky.

This wasn’t a very blog content worthy day. I spent most of the day doing chores around my RV home. My tasks were interrupted by several walks around the campground and down to the boat launch ramp. The campground was very quiet during the middle of the day. Only a few sites were occupied and most of those didn’t have anyone around. By evening more RVs had arrived to spend the night and there was a little more activity in the campground.

I did manage to get a few pictures of the local wildlife to fill in some content in this blog entry.

Tuesday September 5th 2023

The last of the holiday weekend residents departed today. The campground is back into sleepy midweek mode. I am all alone in my part of the campground. A handful of RVs came in late in the afternoon. I imagine they are travelers that will be gone in the morning.

I got the idea to drive up the east side of Lake Seminole today. It proved to be a difficult to impossible task. First the road is way back from the shore. You wouldn’t know there was a lake if you didn’t look at a map. The next surprise was the number of nice wide roads that turned into dead ends. I had to turn around three times when the road came to an end. The only way out to the north was after looping back around to the east and south. I didn’t get very far north, but I did see lots of solar panels. A passed through and around a very large solar power gathering site. Overall my drive was far more east than north. I was north of Tallahassee before I dropped south, picked up Interstate 10 and returned forty miles to the west and home. It was a lot of miles in a very pretty rural Southwest Georgia, Northern Florida area.

In another sign that fall is approaching I noticed that sunset is getting earlier. The time of sunset between Sunday and today has changed by five minutes. I am paying attention so I can walk up the hill to see the sunset over Lake Seminole. Tonight’s sunset was brighter, but less interesting than last nights.

Monday September 4th 2023

It is hard to believe the unofficial end of summer has arrived. When I was a kid in the northeast we always went back to school the Wednesday or Thursday after Labor Day. Now it seems they start before Labor Day to give them more flexibility with “snow” days during the school year. Here in Florida and I think elsewhere in the south, the kids went back to school the first or second week of August. The difference is they finish the year at the end of May rather than the end of June as in the northeast. Still the school year seems to be the reason I think of Labor Day as the end of summer.

The campground emptied out at a steady pace today. All of the weekend visitors packed up and departed for home or their next destination. Since checkout time in this campground is a very generous 3PM, a few campers hung on to the last minute. Tonight the close to sixty RVs are down to fifteen or twenty. I suspect the people who like to avoid holiday traffic will go home tomorrow. The campground is quiet tonight and the smell of campfires is missing.

I am scheduled to leave on Friday. My original plan called for spending the weekend at the KOA in Perry Florida. The town was right in the path of the hurricane. I don’t want to go into an area cleaning up after a disaster. Today I found a site at Silver Springs State Park in Ocala for Friday to Monday. It was available because of a cancellation. The park was full when I checked a few times before booking the KOA in Perry. Now I have to cancel the KOA reservation. I thought that campground might be reaching out to cancel reservations, but their web site seem to be encouraging people to come despite not having all of their utilities and amenities. Is that greed or a desire to provide a service?

The sunset the last couple of nights have been beautiful. Last night there were fewer clouds making a very bright sunset. Tonight the clouds provided a lot of reflection on the relatively calm lake surface. Both nights sunset pictures were interesting.

Sunday September 3rd 2023

The day began cloudy and threatening. It ended warm and sunny. The temperature peaked right around ninety which is the average for the area at the beginning of September. The really hot and humid days start to diminish as the month progresses.

I was temporally challenged today. If you asked me the time, I was likely to be an hour off one way or another. This area is right on the border between eastern time and central time. All of the clocks I set manually are on eastern time. The devices that get set automatically might be either. My cell phone is on central time ninety percent of the time, but occasionally it catches a tower in the eastern time zone and displays eastern time. One TV displays time directly from the TV stations in the central time zone. The other one still seems to be displaying eastern time. My satellite receiver is manually set to eastern time. Devices like my tablet and computer that connect to the internet via cellular data from my mobile access point behave opposite my cell phone. They are usually displaying eastern time and that is where it got confusing. All day yesterday my tablet was displaying eastern time. This morning it started to display central time leading me to believe it was an hour earlier than actual fact. No wonder the day seemed to crawl. I have to remember to look at one of the manually set clocks if the time is really important.

The campground continues to be very busy. A few rigs departed and a few arrived. The campers who brought boats got a chance to use them. The boat launch was very busy. I enjoy the atmosphere of the busy campground in small doses. It will be back to the quiet and tranquil atmosphere tomorrow afternoon about when my enjoyment of the active campground starts to wane.

Saturday September 2nd 2023

The hot and sunny weather pattern that has been dominate for the last few weeks is gone. Today’s high was in the mid eighties under a cloudy sky most of the day. It rained a little in the late morning and the sun attempted to break through the clouds late in the day.

The park today is so different from last weekend. There were about twelve RVs on average each night last weekend. On this holiday weekend there are less than ten empty sites out of sixty plus in the whole park. The atmosphere is more lively. There are even kids riding bicycles and scooters around. Many of the campers brought their boats with them. I don’t think many used them in today’s questionable conditions, but tomorrow should be a good day for boating. It is nice to see people taking advantage of the park’s resources. The only other holiday I’ve been here for is Independence Day a couple of years ago. I don’t recall the park being as busy that time, but it may not have been a true holiday weekend.

On my walks around the park today I kept a lookout for signs of the hurricane. One of the reasons I moved out of the hurricanes path was a concerned for flooding in the campground. When I was here in 2020 we were evacuated in the middle of a tropical storm because the campground was flooding. I talked with a camp host that was here then. She indicated that Wednesday’s event was nothing by comparison to the 2020 event. They got some wind and lots of rain with no flooding. My observations today pretty much confirmed that impression. There was debris in the culverts and signs of runoff along the sides of the road. I didn’t see any sign of standing water. While I don’t regret running from the storm, I would have been OK if I stayed here. You can’t be certain, it is safer to run.

Thursday August 31st 2023

My body is still on Eastern Time so I was up early according to local time. This is my last day in my safe escape zone forty five miles from Florida’s western state line. Hopefully the time zone issue will allow me to get up early tomorrow to prepare for travel. It was a sunny day with seasonal temperatures around 90, but with lots of humidity and little breeze.

I went out scouting for a place to buy gas tomorrow. My motorhome tank is down to about a quarter on the gauge. There are no fuel stations at this Interstate 10 exit. The next exit east has plenty of stations, but it also has lots of traffic and construction. None of the stations were ideal. The ones with easy access had very little room to maneuver at the actual pumps. The bigger stations had difficult access because of construction or would require a u-turn after filling up. The next exit east has a Loves truck stop that I’ve used before. It is over twenty five miles away. I’ll be doing a lot of gauge watching on my way.

While I was out I stopped at Walmart to top off my food supply. This was an older and slightly smaller Walmart. The grocery aisles were narrow and short. A couple of shopping carts or one employee picking an order into blue buckets completely jammed the aisle. Sometimes it was easier to go down a parallel aisle and enter from the other end. I managed to get a few things I needed and a few things I just wanted. It was another one of those shopping while hungry mistakes.

The inside of my RV home is pretty close to ready for travel. I only need to do a few things. The outside tasks I usually do a day ahead remain to be done in the morning. This is probably bad planning. The weather forecast calls for showers all day tomorrow in this area. I should drive out of them as I move east.

Wednesday August 30th 2023

I am still tired today after yesterday’s travel, traffic and heat. The travel was successful. There is no real indication of Idalia here. It was a sunny day with perhaps a little more wind than normal. The temperature peaked at a reasonable 90 degrees.

My first order of business this morning was checking on the progress of the storm. The Weather Channel and some of the local TV station in the storms path that Directv provided were my source of information. It seems the storm came ashore a little further west than anticipated as a category 3 storm. The area I ran from got more rain and wind than originally forecast, but nothing news worthy. I am glad I put miles between me and the storm. Friday I’ll find out if there was any significant damage when I return.

Other areas in my recent and future travel path got more serious impacts. The Jacksonville area where I spent most of the summer got heavy rain, tropical storm force winds and were under tornado watches and warnings most of the day. Jennings Florida on I-75 at the Georgia boarder where I spent a couple of nights last week got the center of the storm as a category 1 hurricane. Neither of these locations would have been any fun to ride out the storm.

Going forward over the next couple of weeks may require a few changes to plans. The weekend starting on the 8th of September was going to be spent in Perry Florida. It was right on the mainline path of the hurricane only about twelve miles inland. The major news services and the Weather Channel all had reporters stationed there. They reported many trees down and massive power outages. I wouldn’t be surprised to find the campground closed for a couple of weeks and I really don’t want to go into an area trying to recover from the storm. The three weeks after that are scheduled at state parks in the Bradenton and Sarasota area. They were closed yesterday without a planned reopening date. Right now there are reports of some wind damage down there, but I suspect it will be cleaned up over the next week allowing the parks to reopen.

I spent the day relaxing around my RV home. My one walk around the campground didn’t result in any interesting discovery. This place has mostly long term residents and nice amenities. It is a nice clean organized place, but not much in the way of scenery.

Tuesday August 29th 2023

I got up this morning and slowly started to packup to move. It is the safe decision. The Lake Seminole area should only get tropical storm winds and a few inches of rain, but the storm has moved west a little with each new update. As I was getting ready to depart several big fifth wheel trailers arrived in the park. They have apparently chosen to ride out the storm at East Bank campground on Lake Seminole. I’m moving on about 100 miles west.

Shortly after the noon hour I pulled out of the campground and made my way south to Interstate 10 and headed west. Traffic may have been a little heavier than normal, but I really don’t know what normal is. The east bound side was filled with lots of power line maintenance trucks from out of state heading for staging areas near the storms path. I’m not sure where they were from, but it always amazes me how many crews come into the state when a storm is approaching. It reminds me of Ice Storms in the northeast during winter. Whenever my power went out during one it seemed like it was always a Quebec Canada crew that restored my power in southern New Hampshire.

The majority of my journey was uneventful. Regular afternoon thunderstorms were in the area. Most of them were south of I-10 near the coast. The edge of a few storms forced me to turn on the windshield wipers a couple of times and the wind really picked up at times. The real event of the day happened in the last fifteen miles. Traffic came to a mostly stopped stop and go mess around mile marker 60. My exit was at mile marker 45. It was 2PM. A couple of heavy wreckers capable of moving big rigs passed by in the breakdown lane. Clearly there was a big accident ahead.

About 4 miles and nearly an hour later I reached an exit from the Intestate. Since traffic still wasn’t moving faster than an occasional 2mph jaunt, I decided to detour to US 90 which parallels I-10. Unfortunately, lots of other people had the same idea. Traffic moved a little faster than 2mph but now there were traffic lights in the mix as well. It was six or seven miles before the traffic started to break up. With the help of my GPS I found the back way into the Eagle’s Landing RV Park in Holt Florida. It was 4PM. The last fifteen miles took 2 hours.

By the time I got setup I was soaking wet from the heat and humidity. I was also ready for a nap, but I needed to eat first. Sitting inside with the AC pumping I recovered without a nap. It will be an early night.