Well…it’s been a decently productive couple of days. After my last post we hung around at Top Sail and didn’t do all that much after our rough 4 days out of 6 traveling. Connie did some work, we walked down to the beach and stood in the surf awhile, we ate more oysters at another restaurant, we got groceries from Walmart and we got ourselves a new Internet access plan. Our previous provider Millenicom…who gave us 20 GB of data monthly for 90  bucks as a Verizon 3G reseller…had their contracts cancelled by Verizon corporate which essentially puts them out of business…so we need a new plan with data via the phone system whenever we aren’t at a campground with wifi. Neil researched the options…there’s essentially a choice between Verizon and AT&T and after some thought we decided to stick with Verizon. It’s a little (very little) better deal than AT&T is offering and having our air card via Verizon and our iPhones on AT&T gives us data from both networks as there are places where one or the other doesn’t work very well.

We also upgraded ourselves to a new 4G/LTE/XLTE capable aircard which gives us faster speeds…and ended up with a 30 GB per month plan for 180 bucks…more than we were paying but it is what it is. Neil wishes we had our telecom companies regulated like the Europeans do as they pay way less than we do for way faster speeds and much more bandwidth per month. Unfortunately…we don’t so we’re stuck with whatever it is. Oh well.

Saturday morning we got up and headed out for Cedar Key…our next destination before arriving in Fort Myers with a planned stop in Mayo FL where we were going to get some details from John Palmer who will be installing our solar panels shortly. We were just getting off of the freeway for fuel and lunch when John called and after a 10 minute phone call he and Neil had swapped all relevant information and John will be calling us back later in the week to coordinate our installation. At this point it looks like we’ll leave Cedar Key on Sat Nov 1 and instead of proceeding to Fort Myers will go back 70 miles north to Mayo for the weekend. After that we’ll move a couple miles to John’s site for the work on Monday with a hope that we can get done and out of there by Wednesday. At that point we’ll drive either direct to Fort Myers or stop overnight depending on what time we get out. This installation will take care of one of our major upgrade projects…the other is our aux fuel tank upgrade. Neil also talked to the folks up in Bradenton who will be installing our TransferFlow 50 gallon tank in the bed as well as a receiver hitch on the rig (so we can mount a bike rack and get them out of the back of the car…this is our third upgrade big upgrade). The tank is on order and once it arrives we’ll schedule an appointment day. That will require hitching the house and BAT and driving about 60 miles north to Bradenton for the day…both installs are one day jobs and we should be home by dinnertime. Since we didn’t have to stop in Mayo we continued on to Cedar Key and got settled into site 3 at the Low Key Hideaway. We had some leftovers for dinner then wandered over to the Tiki Bar for brews and to watch the Alabama Tennessee game…at least the first half…the bar closed at 2100 so we went home (all of 40 feet commute) and watched the rest before heading off to bed.

Here are a couple shots we took this week…the first 3 were taken about sunset at Panama Joe’s Bar and Grill on the beach in Santa Rosa Beach. There was a partial solar eclipse right at sunset that day…but unfortunately by the time the sun got low enough and orange enough to be able to see the moon in front of the sun it had gotten low and behind the clouds so all we got were pretty pictures. The last one is the sunken fishing boat right next to the RV sites here at the Low Key Hideaway.

That’s about it for now…I’ll post a shot of our site as soon as Neil gets around to taking one.