Camping In Florida: The Last Good Weekend Before Summer?

Soon it will be too hot here in Florida to be camping in a tent, so we rolled the dice and booked a weekend at our favorite place: Princess Place Preserve, up near St. Augustine, FL. We were rolling the dice because camping in March can mean rain, freezing cold, or even hot days...but we were lucky this time. This was my first trip to the preserve when the wind wasn't blowing over 15 knots the whole time and my first thought was that we were going to be eaten by mosquitos or noseeums, but the bugs weren't bad at all! I cannot explain that, but we were on the edge of summer heat, warm during the day, but cool enough for long nights around the campfire.

One of these days I will learn that even though this park has water everywhere, there are no fish to catch. I still brought a fishing pole and at least got some casting practice in. Paul was still recovering from a bicycle accident the week before, so he was not allowed to bring his bike. Instead, we hiked and man we did a lot of that. My fitness watch recorded a new record for me, steps in one day. It was something like 24,000 steps. This might explain partially why I gained no weight after all of the not healthy eating all weekend.

The park has a great exhibit for history buffs, and if you liked Downton Abbey, you will like what you see here. I'm still trying to imagine the rich folk coming way out here in the woods for a hunting trip. I wonder how many servants it took to keep them happy.
I never get tired of this place. Next time I'm paddling my board out in the lagoon and figuring out where those fish are hiding. If you go, bring your bicycle. There still might be time for one more nice weekend....

Getting Some After A Long Drought

The way I'm working these days, it is very expensive to take a day off for surfing, but I was caught up with work, we were going camping AND it was predicted that a very long period swell was coming, coinciding with a drop in the wind. Ususally, that means you show up early and it's flat. Not this time. I was surprised to find so few people in the water at Sunglgow pier in South Daytona, but only about three of us started that morning around 7:30 am. You could tell there were more waves than the day before, but the sets, the bigger ones, were really spaced far apart. You could easily paddle from shore to outside the break zone between sets. What I recall more than anything was the power behind this groundswell. You saw a little bump, took a couple of strokes and you were off. I can still remember the guy next to me saying, "Go for the shoulders!". I hadn't heard that since I was a kid, but he was right. I got my butt handed to me many times that day and was thankful for a good leash. It was the kind of day where it became almost impossible to hang on to my large paddleboard when a wave hit me. I'm hoping this year contains many more days like this one.

Seeing How The Other Half Lives: In RVs

On the advice of a friend, or at least my friendly tax consultant, we decided to make a trip to an annual event that promised to be worth the ride, just to see the people attending the show. The event in question is the Florida Annual RV Supershow at the Florida State Fairgrounds in Tampa. I learned many things on that trip.
First thing is, it runs for a week, they charge $10 a person to get in and $6 for parking....and all of this discouraged nobody that I could tell. We arrived at 9:15 and there was already a traffic jam, with various drivers attempting to kill each other to be first in line. Later in the afternoon, as we were driving back home, we noticed the jam extended back on the main highway. I began to see why people were camping in the parking lot, as your ticket was good for two days...as long as you had food and water, you might be okay. Otherwise, you were going to be eating Fair Food...not that there's anything wrong with that!

 In the event that you have ever wondered what it would be like to sleep in the woods, but not on a blowup mattress, wondering if a bear was going to unzip the door sometime during the night, this was the place to get an idea of how it could be. As you can see in the obviously staged photo above, I am quite at home in the driver's seat of a large, expensive vehicle the size of a city bus. However, this photo is fake. I learned early, at age 18, what it was like to pull a 31 foot Airstream trailer behind a larger family sedan, and I never quite recovered from the experience (thanks, Dad). The truth is, if all you had to do was drive in the righthand lane on the freeway, I'd be fine. It's the gas stations that want to rip of the TV antenna you forgot to retract, parking lots, and trying to back it into a campsite, while all of the neighboring pro campers watch in judgement.

This show was full of more people with southern hillbilly accents that you were ever find in a single day in Orlando, so we started talking that way as well. We were almost home before Pam noticed that we were not in North Carolina and probably should be our accents away..but it was fun. If you ever wanted to think about a Trailer or motorhome, this was the place to see all of them at one time. We each had our favorites.

If I was ever going to "rough it RV-style", I'd go the man's route and get this 4X4 Mercedes popup. This was made for the woods, no winerack in this baby. I could see surfboards, mountain bikes...not sure where I would put the kayak yet. I'm still trying to talk the lady down from $109k, but it was a steal compared to what Pam picked out....

Pam said that she could live in the woods if we had something like this...let us just say that the hotel rooms I stay in on vacation are not near this nice. This thing was larger and nicer than most apartments I've seen. I know, I know, you are concerned about the gas mileage, but at $1.1 mil, I do not think the prospective buyers were counting those pennies. A huge irony for me, was that these buses let you on one at a time, and you had to take your shoes off.....I was thinking, hmmmm... maybe I should be taking my shoes off before I go into my tent?

Florida Camping On One Of The Few Cold Days We Get

This is turning out of be one of the hottest Decembers on the the books for Florida, and yet we somehow accidentally picked the one cold weekend of the season to go camping. My brothers and I headed once more to Princess Place Preserve (near Saint Augustine) to get away from it all. We nearly had the whole park to ourselves. To have this sense of isolation in Florida seems unreal. We spent a lot of the weekend building a fire, going for long walks and talking about everything under the sun. It's a little hard to entice the women in our familes to come along, as the nearest real bathroom is a couple miles away, and as I found out, has no electricity or any kind of light at night. The only shower in the whole park is sulphur water, and cold, so we call it "primitive". But...that is what it seems to take to get away from the crowds of RVer's, the wild party groups and the big families. You get old Florida nature, and plenty of it.

We were in a spot called Moody 1, and my tent was mere feet from the salt water marsh and in the middle of the woods. I never even saw a campfire that wasn't ours, the whole weekend. Friday morning, I was in shirt and flip flops and by midnight that night I was wrapped in my mummy bag, trying to keep my nose from getting cold. The whole time, I could hear the wind howling over the marsh, enough that I wondered if my tent stakes would hold.

We took turns cooking and it was "guy" food. Lots of meat, light on the veges. I made Mulligan stew Friday night and I'm almost getting proud of my version, thanks to the help of my wife with the recipe and the input from the family. Paul brought the organic burgers and Steve brought steaks, eggs, and bacon. We had to do a lot of hiking to work off that food, and Princess Place is great for that.

Great for just walking along dirt roads through the woods, but there are a lot of historic things to see, like the old swimming pool for the hunting lodge. The park is neat as a pin and makes you feel like you want to help keep it that way. We saw some animals, and the best siting was as great horned owl just hanging out on the ground while we watched. Unfortunately, that owl blended in so well that my photos of him looked like nothing at all.

Next trip, we will bring bikes and kayaks, and continue our discussions of movies, politics, and just about everything. I will have to remember to bring a battery backup for my electronics...hey, you didn't think I would go totally unplugged, did you?

Passing Through Mailbu

The food at the Hacienda was fantastic and there was so much of it! It was one of the better meals of our whole trip. After that great dinner, we headed back to the hotel and had a good sleep. The day had ended quite differently than it started. In retrospect, the best parts of the trip were at the beginning up in the Northwest, before we got down to the crowded part of California. Even so, there were some moments worth remembering. Driving south from Salinas, we drove through a very busy Monterey and things only got busier as we headed south. Fortunately, my wife was there to make sure I took all the right turns, and to add inspiration to my driving of this little 3 cylinder commuter car in the hectic California freeway system. In spite of our best navigational efforts, we still found ourselves lost in the middle of a busy 6 lane highway and I managed to take one of the most interesting wrong turns of the whole trip. We ended up driving up and down a canyon of zillion dollar mansions, mostly hidden in the woods, me gripping the steering wheel for dear life while tractor trailers ran as close as they could behind me, and my wife oohhing and ahhing at the houses. You have to wonder who lived back in there. I still remember seeing a rickety old cafe on the side of the road in the canyon, fancy cars and fancy people all dining in a place that looked like a hippie spot. We should have stopped, but I was afraid to even slow down at that point. It was "floor it" going up hill, and "hope I don't have to use the brakes" going down. My view of Malibu was quite different than what I had seen on television!

Salinas: The Bad, The Ugly, And The Happy Ending

The booking of the seedy hotel in Montery was not the end of our adventure. To sweeten the pot, we decided to stay one more night. My wife took charge and went to the main desk only to find that our little haven was in such demand than one more night would cost more than $60 more than the first night. Rather than reward the enterprising nature of our hotel manager, my wife decided to give me one more chance to prove the superiority of a computer master in the Information Age. I promptly found that almost every room in the whole town was previously engaged, unless we wanted to try spending $500 for a $100 room. I then widened the search and came up victorious with a $150 room that was a few minutes drive into the desert. We walked the town, seeking the otters and sea lions that we had enjoyed on a previous journey, but none were to be found.  We ate lunch at Islands, and had the Mahi sandwich, which was good, not great. I finally found the surf break, but the day was gloomy and the waves weren't worth photographing, so we began the journey that turned out to be the excitement of the day.

First, to say that Salinas is a few minutes into the desert is like saying the moon is closer than Mars. We drove on and on down a highway with no features but the occasional field of some plants and groups of pickers slaving away. The good news here was we stopped at a local truck stand and got some of the best strawberries we've ever had. We were heading towards the Laurel Inn, a place I'd never heard of and I was filled with forboding about what I would have to endure if it was another rathole.

I started to get the feeling that we were heading towards the town where all of the migrant workers had to live. I expected Payday loan stores, pawn shops, and abandoned storefronts. Instead, we pulled into a beautiful, seemingly recent-built town with all kinds of nice stores and places to eat. Eveen the hotel seemed a lot nicer than the Friday night stop and I pulled in with a smile on my face and sent my wife in to do the business of checking. It was then that I pulled up my Priceline.com receipt and saw with dismay that I had somehow booked the only "Smoking" room in the whole hotel. Since my wife is severely allergic to smoke and many other things, I thought I might need to mention this. I ran inside the hotel, hearing words like "yes, that is the last room we have!".....and blew my gaskets.

I would say in my defense, that I only blamed myself, loudly, but somehow exactly how I needed to do it because the manager overheard, and fixed the whole thing. We ended up a good room for a great price and a reccomendation to the best restaurant of the whole trip: The Hacidenda. If only we could somehow have managed to stay up past 9pm, we would have heard a great band perform on a stage that looked like large concert stage at a venure. In fact, the waitress told us that tickets were $25 to see a Banda.

Monterey: The Town, The Park And How To Not Pick A Hotel

We pulled into Montery on Friday and ended up sticking around for two nights...which wasn't as easy as you might think. We knew the weekend might make it a bit more difficult, so I took charge and showed my wife how it is done in the modern age with a smartphone and Hotels.com. Quicker than a wink, I had us fixed up with the most expensive and rattiest hotel of our trip. Who needs an air conditioner anyway? I forgot to mention that while California is usually cooler than Florida, there are moments of 100 degree heat and we managed to find them. My wife was kind and barely mentioned the small bed, and what passed for a full breakfast in the morning. I impressed her with the idea that we were going to try to lose some weight anyway, and the greasy guy bringing out the limp half slices of sausages only served to help us with our attempt.

Saturday was saved by a random trip to Point Lobos, while I was trying to find the local surf breaks. we came across a state park that was well worth the $7 to get in. We ended up spending a good part of the day hiking through the park, looking at the rock formations in the fog and seeing the scuba divers head out into the lagoon. We initally drove in at 7:30 in the morning and I thought, "We have finally left the crowds behind! They are all going to Jazz festivals, and walking down Cannery Row, while we brave the fog and the cold of nature at the coast!" Then we came around the corner to where the scuba divers go and found the first full parking lot...