Leaving Palmetto

Our two months as the guests of Teri and Carson Robinson is coming to an end, and it will be another two months before we begin our 2016 adventure.  The van is washed and waxed, and we are slowly moving everything back into the camper in preparation of living out of doors once again.

Our backyard for the past two months...

We'll be camping around Florida while we wait for spring to reach the East Coast, probably spending up to a week at a time at various Florida State Parks.  We are hoping to spend each Friday and Saturday with friends or family, as many Florida parks are fully booked on weekends (unless we head quite a ways north).  We plan to spend at least one week exploring Southern Florida and the Everglades, and the rest of the time we'll likely stay in Central and North Central Florida.

We've really enjoyed our time here in Palmetto.  Teri and Carson's generosity has given us a great place to adequately address a number of technical problems with our camper, to host a Christmas get together, to thoroughly clean our camper and van, and to get resupplied for another year on the road.  It's made it possible for us to temporarily expand our menu options and enjoy some foods that aren't very practical using the simple galley of our Camp Inn camper.  

But it is always difficult trying to live partly out of a temporary shelter (even one as nice as this) and partly in the camper.  We've become spoiled on the road by never having to mop a floor, vacuum a carpet or clean a toilet, so we are definitely looking forward to the simplicity of returning to our camper, and hoping we won't have too much cold, wet and/or severe weather to contend with these next two months.  We're also anxious to find an area with roads that better accommodate cyclists, which are currently few and far between in our immediate area.  Our first priority will be to check out State Parks nearest to converted rail trails, so we can safely rebuild some of our endurance before hitting the road again.  We likely will start posting once or twice a week until April, and will post more frequently once we start traveling again.

I was successful yesterday in setting up a Twitterfeed account for the purpose of automatically having my blog posts also appear on my Facebook page.  There is an up to six hour time lag before posts appear on Facebook, as I've set it up to only check for new posts every six hours.

Our plans for next week include visiting our friend Marty Malone in Palm Harbor, attending an informal get together of teardroppers at Tomoka State Park next weekend and spending Super Bowl Sunday with Jean.