Travels with Gunther and Kara

Neil ended up with a  cut on his noggin today. He was outside working on an upgrade to our slide topper support and flagpole to add some retaining pins to the support and some short holding chains to keep the pins on it and the flagpole from getting lost and banged his head on the edge of the hitch. He’s got a split about an inch long in the skin up on top of his head…it isn’t deep enough to warrant stitches but did bleed a lot (scalp wounds are like that).

He’s surviving it though; we had leftover chicken and pasta for dinner and then headed off to the Elks. This is a different lodge than we were in before since we’re in Sarasota now.

Other than that; not much else new. Connie fought the internet all day trying to get some work done, Neil had a bike ride, we doctored Neil’s injury but it involves blood so I won’t post it, we ate, and we drank beers.

He also went by the local Lazy Boy dealer to see about getting Connie’s recliner fixed (the side broke). For now Neil gave her his recliner and he’s using the double wide instead. Getting hers fixed involves ordering parts by the local dealer which takes 5-6 weeks…then once the parts are in hand Neil will make an appointment wherever we happen to be and get the parts trans-shipped to the repairing dealer for installation. Pain in the butt but guess that’s one of the drawbacks of having no fixed physical address.

Not much else going on. Tomorrow we’re going to Myakka River State park for some hikes, bird watching and similar fun stuff.

Cyas.

Today was a pretty chilly and breezy day. We headed off about 0700 for Mass at Saint Jude’s about 4 miles away and then came home to have bacon, eggs, and leftover mashed taters for breakfast. Neil took out a couple of chicken breasts and considering the weather forecast elected to toss them into the crock pot with some chopped carrots, chopped onions, some chicken stock and assorted spices. After letting them cook for about 5 hours he added some finely diced bacon and some Fusilli (bow-tie) pasta that he had precooked about 1/2 way. Letting all that oodle for another hour so and it turned into a mighty nice smelling dinner. We passed on the afternoon ice cream social since it was so chilly…it only made it to the mid 60’s maybe…it was so cool that Neil had to put on a shirt when he went running right before lunch.

We whiled away the rest of the afternoon listening to podcasts, watching golf on the TV, and reading on the iPad. Neil went back and found a couple of neat pictures from our last Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary trip that hadn’t been posted; a gator and a Little Blue Heron.

He really liked the pose with the heron leaving over to look for dinner about 2 feet from that gator below him. I guess gators don’t consider herons lunch or else it wasn’t hungry.

Tomorrow Connie has some more work to do getting her students organized…this is turning out to be one of the needier classes she has had…and they can’t follow simple directions either.

Neil’s got some bills to pay and other administrivia to handle; we’ve got a hike planned for Wednesday as the weather is supposed to warm up by then; tomorrow and Tuesday are still going to be cool and windy.

Cyas.

I thought it was s’posed to be warm in Florida. Neil went to bed early last night as he didn’t really feel very well and we got up this morning to temps in the 50’s, mostly cloudy, damp, and 25 knots of wind. Yuk. We persevered anyway and after breakfast and waking up Neil went on a bike ride. After that he took some pictures of our campsite area. First is our new sign to hang on our flag pole. We have a nice painted sign on order but the artist is still designing it…and we needed the counterweight for our flag pole design anyway so he got the nameplate with our names and url.

Here is our site LA69 (the LA is for Lake) although saying this site is a lake site is a bit of as stretch. Here is the lake itself.

and when Neil turned 180º around and looked across the access road that parallels the lake you can look perpendicular to the lake down the street that site LA69 is situated on.

If you look really, really carefully starting at the white SUV immediately behind the red chair on the right…another 6 or 8 cars down the way you can see just the rear end of our blue Mazda poking out, it’s the 3rd car from the far end on the right side of the street. Beyond that across a field is Fruitville Road which is the main east/west drag that the park is on. Some lake view, huh?

Here is a picture of our site setup…nope, no lake view here either.

As you can see the sites are a bit close together (actually they’re a lot close together says Neil) and we backup to another row or RVs so we have absolutely no view of anything except other people’s living rooms and bike racks on the rear of the rig. I guess one doesn’t come to a resort park for the view.

The bar in the park (Boondock Poolside Bar and Grill) that we had a beer at yesterday is pretty noisy and has a fairly limited selection of food. There’s enough on the menu to have a snack but it didn’t look like it was really an eating kind of place. The pool, hot tub and exercise room area here are very nice based on seeing them during our tour up here a month or two ago although we haven’t used them yet since it’s too cool and windy to get out of a pool wet. Maybe it will warm up in a day or so.

Dinner tonight is going to be a NY Strip Steak; although Neil is thinking about making a steak salad out of it rather than a more typical steak and taters dinner. After that we’re off to the local concert hall (it’s a Frank Lloyd Wright design — and is purple, very strange) to hear a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (that’s the one with the Ode to Joy and chorus in the final movement, even if you don’t think you know Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony I can almost guarantee that you would recognize it you heard it). Connie found this a week or two back when looking for stuff to do here so we grabbed a couple of tickets.

Neil reorganized the back of BAT today (well, reorganized might be a little more extravagant of a description than what he actually did)…he just swapped the storage locations of our ladder and generator bin so that the ladder is on the curb side of the bed…he discovered yesterday that getting the handle for disengaging the hitch onto the lever that it attaches to is 99.64% impossible with the ladder where it was on the street side of the bed; hence the swap to make things easier next time.

Connie saw a squirrel climbing down the ladder of an adjacent rig this morning…this rig has the strangest ladder arrangement we’ve ever seen. It’s got the standard RV rooftop ladder but it stops about 8 feet off the ground with only the top half being there; it then has an 8 foot fiberglass step ladder lashed upside down to the fixed ladder and then there’s a 12 foot or so straight ladder leaning up against both of those down to the ground. Anyway; she was watching out the window and saw this squirrel jumping nice as you please from one step of the straight ladder to the next all the way down.

That’s about it for today, nothing new to report otherwise.

Cyas

We got up today; had coffee and breakfast and started working on breaking camp about 0830. Connie did the inside while Neil did all the outside tasks, taking down the flag, packing the basement, and the like. We dumped the tanks, hitched up to BAT, and hit the road about 1230 or so. After a 70 mile transit straight up I-75 to Sarasota; we’re here in site LA69 at the Sun N Fun Resort. I forgot to get a picture but will take one tomorrow and post it them.

We rolled into our standard arrival routine…Connie cleaned the house inside and pulled all the stowed decorations, countertop items, and stuff out of their safe travel locations. Neil brought on the utilities, rigged the slide topper supports, raised the flag, ran the under coach lights, and anchored the awning down.

After that, Neil went on a quick bike ride through the park then we had a shower…because frankly both of the adults were kinda stinky after their hard work today. After that we headed up to the Boondock Poolside Bar and Grill and had a couple of Yuengling’s.

After that it was getting towards dark so we headed back home. Neil chose poorly and put on shorts after his shower, it was damp, windy and cloudy this afternoon so he was glad to get back home, change into jeans, and flip on the fireplace while he was making dinner.

After quickly whipping up a couple of wine coolers…I can tell you that Conquista Torrontes wine from Argentina is pretty good…he started some rice in the rice cooker. On that was done he took a 1 pound piece of Ahi Tuna that we got the day before yesterday at Costco, coated the top and bottom with coarse ground black pepper and toasted sesame seeds, and seared it about 60 seconds on both sides. This cooks just the top 1/8 inch or so and leaves the inch thick center completely raw. Sliced it up thin and served with rice, soy sauce, wasabi, and some pickled ginger for Neil (Connie refuses to eat it). What a yummy dinner.

So far; I’m not sure whether the adults like resort parks or not…it seems kind of busy and crowded compared to Seminole and other state parks we’ve lived in but we’re going to give it a whirl the next 6 days and see how a more upscale resort type atmosphere grows on us.

We found a broken piece in Connie’s recliner…this is terrible and must be fixed ASAP…we looked on google and found a nearby LZ-Boy dealer where we’ll take it over the weekend and see what they want to do about. LZ-Boy’s have a lifetime warranty so I imagine they’ll just replace it…although it won’t be in stock and we’ll have to get it shipped up to Pensacola to pick up in a couple weeks when we are up at Gulf State park.

Fun stuff…I don’t think Connie has figured out what we’re doing yet. She ended up with 6 hours of work today between what she did last evening and today answering emails and solving problems as we got ready to travel and setup afterwards. We did receive our new flag signs as well, I’ll get a picture of them tomorrow as well as our site.

Cyas.

Today was another day spent getting ready to get on the road on Friday. After coffee and breakfast (leftover mashed taters from last night, sausage links, and a fried egg on top) we headed off to Costco to stock up on meat. We got a package of 12 chicken breasts which we split up for the freezer; a double pork tenderloin which went into 8 pieces for later use; and 5 New York Strips which also went into the freezer. We got a piece of Ahi Tuna for dinner on Friday…it will be covered with cracked pepper and seared about 30 seconds on a side then sliced thin and served with wasabi, soy sauce, and rice. We also got some more chocolate raisins and Hershey’s Nuggets for Neil so he can continue his chocolate fix as well as a couple bottles of Argentinian Malbec wine.

Coming home Neil checked the air pressure in all of our tires and pumped up the ones that were low, went on a bike ride, changed out a couple of burned out light bulbs in our floor night lighting while Connie worked on some of the last details of scheduling her current class of phlebotomists and prepared for her online video presentation to them this evening.

About 1600 Neil got up and made dinner…sliced up a couple of Italian sausages he had defrosted, added some onions, garlic, tomato paste and a bit of red wine (he opened one of the bottles of Malbec, yum) and some Italian spices. Served it up with some linguini, grated Parmesan Reggiano and some more Malbec…quite a good dinner and we even have some left over for lunch tomorrow.

Neil’s heading off in a bit for computer club here at the park…he got rope into leading it which essentially means he helps people solve their computer issues. After that…we’ll watch some TV until time for bed. Tomorrow is a grocery run and then Taco night at the Elks…you can’t complain about two huge taco salad bowls and a pitcher of beer for about 10 bucks…then we’re up Friday to break camp and head off for Sun N Fun park in Sarasota.

Another nice bird picture from one of our recent walkabout at Corkscrew, a male cardinal.

Cyas.