Lake Kissimmee State Park, FL

We spent last weekend at Camp Jean in Oviedo, getting caught up on laundry, shopping and other chores.  Several weeks back my new Toshiba laptop's hard drive died.  It has been a long, slow process to get that repaired.  First I had to spend $40 for recovery media.  When that didn't work I spent 45 minutes with tech support before they decided that it had to be a defective hard drive.  So I ordered a shipping box from FedEx for another $30, and it arrived yesterday, nine days after it was ordered.  So it is now on its way back to Toshiba, who say it will 7-10 days for them to turn it around, then they will ship it back.  We are more than a bit concerned that it may not get returned before we start heading north.  But that's just part of the challenge of living on the road.  If this happens again I'll know better than to try to replace anything under warranty...

On our way from Oviedo to Lake Kissimmee things started to look very familiar, because for several miles we retraced part of Adventure Cycling's Florida Connector bicycle route.  The narrow, shoulderless roads reminded us of why we'll resume this year's travels at St. Augustine.  Many of the roads south of St. Augustine are not roads we would want to ride on again, now that we know what they are like.

We've had awesome weather the past week and a half, with sunny skies, highs in the 70s and 80s, and virtually no rain.  The same pattern should hold through the rest of this week, at which point the temperatures remain the same, but the chance of rain increases.  Though being Florida, that usually means a line of storms will come through at some point during the day, not that it will rain all day long.

We have a great campsite at Lake Kissimmee State Park that is orders of magnitude better than where we were last week at Highlands Hollow.  We are nestled among pine trees, live oak and palmettos, with no view of our neighbors and a limited view of the road.  The latter is great, as Lana is not constantly on guard like she had been all of last week, feeling the need to scare off every dog that walked by.  Though in the evening she has had her guard up, as the armadillos go crashing through the underbrush in search of food.  She is nearly beside herself because they'll come to just shy of the end of her leash.  The fact that she is crying and yapping at them doesn't faze them in the least.

Campsite 29.

Today we are headed to Hillsborough River State Park (NE of Tampa), where we will spend four nights.