Florida Archives - Page 3 of 3 -

Happy Thanksgiving!

November 28, 2014 Drew

Happy Thanksgiving! This is our first holiday away from both sets of families. While they know we love them, I can’t say we haven’t had a great Thanksgiving in Florida!

Earlier in the week, a big cold front came through, and the weather gods decided it would be a good idea to test my feeble waterproofing attempts. It rained hard for over 24 hours. A few hours in, I checked the weather – it said weather advisory – yep, it said flood watch – yep, it said lots of rain – yep, it said “Heaviest accumulations north of the I-4 corridor – yep, I looked outside – yep, we were in for a monsoon! My silicon-caulking job held at first, but eventually water started seeping in around the side window and the top of the front windows. The only other leak we detected was from part of the roof vent. Noelle rigged a nice little water catcher for that – she’s so smart!

I got bored and decided to fix the oven vent fan. It would vibrate, and make a real racket when running. I pulled the fan part off, tightened the support bolts, cleaned everything, and reassembled. Now we have a whisper quiet oven vent fan – sweet! I wish all projects were like that.

After the rain died down, the weather turned nice and pleasant. We’ve been able to get a decent amount of work time in. We also hit up this awesome used bookstore. An entire room full of romance novels kept Noelle pretty busy – and they had the good vintage stuff, none of this new age “everyone loves each other” junk!

We missed our families for the holiday, but we are still having way too much fun in the sun to go back now!

Florida, Road Trip

Daytona Beach

November 24, 2014 Drew

We made it to the beach! Honestly, there is a part of me that thinks this whole plan to quit my job and travel around was just a big elaborate excuse to go to the beach – well today we have officially achieved that goal – success!

The weather is finally warming up a bit (although they say it will cool down again in a couple days). To get the most out of the fleeting warm temps, we spent two great days hanging out at Daytona Beach and Ormond Beach.

The beaches were really pretty nice – not to crowded, nice and sandy, decent surf. We spent the $5 and drove out onto the beach at Daytona to park. At Ormond Beach, we decided to park for free at the Andy Romano beachfront park – they had a decent food stand there too.

Noelle and I both love the water – I want to eventually try surfing, she wants to eventually try scuba diving. Well we started with buying this sweet boogie board. I’m obviously writing this post after the fact, but we had a great time attempting to ride the waves with that thing – granted it is also already broken into two pieces, but hey it still works!

We hit up Joe’s Crab Shack for a really nice (and really expensive) seafood lunch – yumm!!!

One of the guys caught a huge fish right after I took this pic – his wife brought it up in a net, and he just smiled and walked the length of the jetty like a boss before putting it in his cooler – the other fisherpeople were so jealous.

At one point in the day, Noelle and I just looked at each other and said something like “Yep… this is what we are supposed to be doing.” We had a nice couple of days!

Florida, Road Trip

Flying J

November 22, 2014 Drew

We’ve spent the last few days at a great little RV campground outside Savannah, but it is still getting way to cold. We decided to make a long haul further south into Florida – this included our first dry camping stay at a Flying J – it actually worked out pretty well!

Before we hit the road again, we stopped at the historic Wormsloe Plantation estate. This place has been around since the earliest colonial period in Georgia around 1730, but all that remains of the original homestead is a little bit of decaying fort walls. Honestly, with a $10 entrance fee this place was not really worth it – especially compared to the really cool personalized tours we got for like $5 at the Carl Sandberg Home and Carson House earlier.

The trees were cool though! We drove the rest of the day, making it down the road to a Flying J outside of St. Augustine. Interestingly enough, this isn’t the first time we’ve slept at a truck stop, but it is the first time with the camper. The place was pretty full, but we found a spot in between two bigger rigs.

I’m a big newb at all of this, but even I know that truck stop etiquette says you don’t deploy your RV slideouts, and you definitely don’t run your generator for more than a few minutes at night. The lovely old couple next to us missed that memo. By midnight, we couldn’t take the rumbling noise and noxious gas fumes so we moved over to a different spot.

Unfortunately 5 minutes later a truck cab pulled up right next to us – which wouldn’t be a big deal except that they never shut that thing down. It just kept rumbling away at idle… for hours… Everything in the camper was vibrating from the cabinets to the light fixtures – I felt like my eyeballs were bouncing out of my head! Ok that’s a little dramatic, but it turns out there is this whole RV’er vs. trucker battle out on the internets. On the RV’ers’ side, peace and quiet; on the truckers’ side, comfort and lower maintenance costs. I’m an RV’er so screw those trucker bastards!

We moved to a third location at about 2 in the morning, nestled between a big boxy 80’s motorhome and a 70’s VW bus. The camper must have felt right at home there, and we got a decent night’s sleep. Overall, we were pretty happy with the Flying J experience. The restrooms were clean, the attached Subway provided dinner, they have donuts in the morning – and you can’t get cheaper than free! We will definitely be adding truck stops to our camping repertoire from now on.

So after a long day of driving and a long night of Flying J’ing, we’ve officially arrived in Florida! Let the sunny good times begin (hopefully)!