Andy & Gillie's Big Adventure!: December 2015

This will certainly be the last blog post before Christmas, probably New Year as well, so won’t detain you too long. Tomorrow we go to our Christmas base at Fort Myers Beach, [actually finishing it off there now – ed.] but for now we are camped in a lovely (if expensive) campground in Sarasota, called Turtle Beach (clue). We are literally 30 seconds walk to the beach that faces west to the Gulf of Mexico, so we are treated to some spectacular sunsets, around 5.30 each evening.

Usually, we go over our progress from the last post to bring you up to speed. And why should this one be any different, you may ask? Well, it won’t be. Sorry if you got mildly excited.

Rather cheeky of Gillie to give you the lowdown on St Augustine, but it saves me doing it, I suppose. Suffice to say that we had a lovely dinner on the Sunday night with friends of friends – who we had only met the previous Friday! Thank you Susan and Jorge for a great evening and ferrying us back to the campground afterwards.

The next day we made our way - all of 15 miles - via a free bus and another trolley tour of St Augustine, to Walmart for the night. As part of our trolley tour, we took in a free tour of the St Augustine Distillery, which has only been open about 15 months and hand-crafts its own gin, vodka, rum and – soon – bourbon. Very entertaining, plus free samples! We did what they hoped we would do and bought a bottle of gin. And it’s superb. Very unlike the London Dry, but very, very nice…

Let’s move on now. After St Aug, we drove into the centre of Florida and stayed at Kissimmee State Park. Now there’s a name, wouldn’t you say? It was lovely, but pissed down, so we spent our time wisely decorating Molly Too ready for the Christmas season (see pic).

Even the rain couldn’t deter us from the enjoyment that has been driving across Florida, west to east and back and we stayed at the delightfully-named Okeechobee the next night. Think about it, Apalachicola, Kissimmee and Okeechobee – all in the same state. Good innit?

By now it was time to make our way across to North Hollywood, Miami, to meet up with our good friends from England, Joelle and Guenther, who had come across the pond for a brief pre-Christmas break. Our campground was, well, odd, made up as it was of 95% Quebequois Snowbirds and with a distinctly religious feel to the place. Anyway, not to matter, we had a great weekend with our friends and enjoyed days on the beach and lovely food.

Eventually, we headed back west, with another stop in Okeechobee before a slightly disorganized couple of days, which saw us stay in Turtle Beach and then up to Clearwater, before dropping back south to Turtle Beach.

A quick word about the delights of Sarasota and its environs. When we arrived at the campground, we set ourselves up and walked the very short way to the beach. There we were treated to the rather splendid sight of seabirds fishing. Imagine, if you will, the prehistoric shape of the large Brown Pelican, silhouetted against the setting sun, closely monitored by their constant companion, the greedy gull. Suddenly, the pelican flies higher, cocks its head, then dive bombs into the water, not 10 feet from shore.

Cannily, we discovered, the pelican keeps its head under water while the gull literally sits on it, until the predator has safely secured its prey and lifts its head from the sea to gulp down a tasty marine morsel. Yum. This went on for a good two hours until the sun had set gloriously in the west. It was a free show and, to be fair, the gulls contributed with their own aerodynamic displays of fish-diving too.

However, the free aerial display was not the only attraction of this area. Just a 60 cent bus ride away (seniors rate) was the ‘USA’s #1 beach’ – Siesta of that name – and it is quite magnificent. A vast expanse of the whitest sand and a very shallow tidal area means bathing delights for all. In addition, every Sunday evening as the sun sets a group of people who like drumming gather on the sands and spend about two hours bashing away rhythmically on bits of percussion, accompanied by people chucking bits of stick up in the air, dancers – idiot and other – hula hoops for all and a general good vibe for everyone who sits and watches or takes part. Almost made me feel like getting the ukulele out!

For now, however, I’m content to sit quietly in or near Molly and find my way through a few tunes in private. So far, I’ve sort of mastered ‘One Love’ ; ‘Summertime’; ‘I Feel Fine’; ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’; ‘Helpless’ and ‘Hallelujah’ as well as a couple of others I’m coming to grips with. Slowly. Not yet concert standard, however.

Like to sign off by wishing you all the most wonderful Christmas and New Year. We’ve been spending a bit of time recently wondering where we might be next Christmas, while at the same time determined to relish this rather unusual experience – just the two of us and the alligators. We’ll have to be nice to each other!

As you may have realised (or not), this is an acrostic. I could have done something cheesy like Happy Christmas, but heigh ho…Have a great one. A xxx

PS. Hi there. Here we are at last, in our Christmas and New Year ‘home,’ for the next 10 days!! We were quite worried as we drove here yesterday, thinking we may have booked somewhere grotty. However it is rather lovely! Our site is on the edge of a lake, where we can sit and watch yet another load of sunsets while sipping the $4.75 (!) ‘champagne’ that we bought at Walmart on our way. We’ve also bought turkey breasts for Andy to bbq on the ‘day’ so all in all we’re all set up (except for the fact we couldn’t find any Yorkshire puddings and it’s a step too far to make them in Molly’s cooker.) We’ve also heard that Fort Myers has a firework display on New Years Eve, on the beach, so eat your heart out London and Sydney!!

I’ve got a confession to make, last night at 7pm after we’d settled in, we went to Bingo in the clubhouse. Our excuse is that it was a way of getting to know the locals, but in fact we rather enjoyed it and Andy even won a burger, chips and soda meal (so that’s his Christmas lunch sorted then and I can have his turkey!) [don’t think so – ed.] We were really hopeless and decided to just have one card each, even though everyone else had six and more. We’ve made a date with the lovely people who helped us, to meet them next week and we’ve promised ourselves we may even up our cards to two each!!

So as you can see, life in Florida is all that we expected it to be and as we are just a cycle ride from the beach I’m sure we can cope. We are using this time as our wind down time before the delights of South America hit us. We are getting very excited as we have booked our time in Peru and Chile, using lovely Airbnbs, buses and trips, we only have Argentina to sort out now. We’re sitting by our lake now and Andy has just shown me a leaflet issued by the campground, urging us not to feed the alligators. Do they mean here??

Time to go, here’s hoping we survive our time here and that you all have an amazing Christmas and lots of fun at New Year. See you in 2016!! Much love and kisses, Gillie XXXXX

PPS. Andy is right about Siesta Beach, it is soooooo gorgeous, the sand is unbelievable and the colour of the sea…wow!! Also the little village two minutes walk away is so funky and lively, we loved it all. Definitely a good place to visit and maybe return to!! xxxx

With Guenther & Joelle in Miami

Pimping Molly Too for Christmas

Spectacular aerial displays

And more

No, that's not snow in the picture!

'I may be gone a little while...'

There, you see, it really is Christmas!

Dancey stuff with drums

Other things with drums.

Sunset on Siesta Beach

Miami Beach again (bit out of order, as usual!)

As the picture says...

Well, it’s been a while. Again! No real excuses this time, except that we haven’t had brilliant wifi. (And we’ve been a bit lazy, if truth be told!)

Now, here’s a thing. It seems like our last post was the least popular of all 31 posts to date, with only 21 views. But our stats say that there were over 190 page views last month and more than 5,000 all-time history (whatever all that means). Doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to us. We’d love to know, somehow, whether these figures are accurate or, if anyone out there understands this stuff, whether we’re misreading the data. Just vanity really!

We’re currently in Anastasia State Park, St Augustine, Florida and it’s quite lovely. It is, of course, winter here, so the weather (typical Brit!) is cooler – about 26-29 C on average. Life, as they say, is a bitch.

So, where were we? Ah yes, Biloxi. Moving on…we did a couple of Walmarts, then arrived at the first in a short series of State Parks that we have booked into for parts of November and December. Now, there are a lot of State Parks in Florida – indeed in USA generally – but unless you book 11 months in advance, there’s no chance of getting a weekend booking between the months of November and March, as all the Snowbirds flock down for the winter. So we managed to book some available weekdays – and that wasn’t easy either, I can tell you.

The Florida Panhandle is a little-known, but quite lovely area of the state, joining up the rather plain Alabama coast with the more illustrious parts of the Sunshine State. The Forgotten Coast is what they call it in the publicity blurb, and…now where was I?...Oh yes, it really does feel a bit forgotten at times. But it has some exquisite beaches, with genuine white sand, which brings us back to Grayton Beach State Park, our first proper stop in Florida. Boring geological fact alert: the sand is so white because, apparently, there are no river deltas feeding into this part of the Gulf of Mexico to make it turn brown or discolour it in any way. In fact, it’s supposed to be the whitest sand anywhere in the world. But this is America, so they would say that, wouldn’t they!? The beach was very white, though.

While we were there, we met up with friends of ours from Fleet – Pete and Sue, who were staying with friends in St Augustine and drove about 400 miles to come and have a barbeque with us! How lovely it was to see them and to have slightly (!) too much to drink while enjoying good chats and laughs. They drove all the way back the next day too!

We spent a few days there before moving on to what Gillie considers to be the finest RV park we have stayed in during our 14+ months on the road, Coastline RV Park at a place called Apalachicola. Every site had a view of the sea, all were perfectly flat and paved and the toilets were of 5* hotel standard. If we weren’t booked up at other places, we might well have stayed for ages! The only caveat I can think of was that they didn’t have firepits!

Just over the water from the Shangri-La that was Coastline RV Park, is St George Island State Park where we also stayed, but again for only two nights and although it had lovely easy-to-reach beaches, we were plagued by flies at our campsite – so only 2.5*.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. Well, not quite, but big contrasts with our next stop, which was at a place called Cedar Key, whose main claim to fame, apart from being a charming hippy-type backwater along the Panhandle, where I for one felt very much at home, was that it was the location for shooting parts of ‘Easy Rider’ – the famous ‘end of innocence/hippy ideal’ road movie with a great soundtrack starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and featuring a cameo by a then unknown Jack Nicholson.

If you’re following this on a detailed map of Florida, then you’ve done better than we have all the way around the States. They don’t believe in detailed maps, just as long as they show where the advertisers’ restaurants, attractions, casinos, real estate offices are, who gives a shit about the roads?!

At two completely unrelated places earlier in our travels – one a campground in Maine and the other in a Walmart car park in Bar Harbor, the next campground was recommended to us. ‘if you’re going to Florida, you must stay at Rock Crusher Canyon RV Park’. Well, with a name like that, how could we resist?

Because we were approaching Thanksgiving time of year, we thought we had better make sure we knew where we were for that big event, so we booked in for nine nights! The longest, apart from house sits, we had stayed anywhere on all our travels. It was very relaxing knowing we didn’t have to put foot to pedal for such a long time, but we were a bit away from things.

Not to worry, we had our bikes and cycled 13 miles to visit the most endearing creatures – manatees – at Three Sisters Springs, where people were actually snorkelling with them! Jealous!

We also experienced our first (and probably last) ever Thanksgiving Dinner. At the clubhouse (yes – you read correctly) at Rock Crusher Canyon. Everybody paid $5 each and provided either a veg, salad or ‘dessert’ (pudding) and they provided the rest: turkey, several types of spud, stuffing, biscuits, gravy. It was very sociable and jolly and we’re glad we did it!

Leaving RCC, we paid a visit to Homosassa Springs Wildlife Refuge, and had the pleasure of visiting Lu the oldest (we think) living hippopotamus in captivity – 56 next January. All he does is eat, sleep and shit. Not bad eh? We also saw lots of other lovely beasts and birds who are on the endangered or threatened species lists in Florida or the States in general.

Which brings me to Anastasia State Park, where we are now, and St Augustine, where we shall be this coming weekend for a couple of festivals (something to do with the British occupation – hooray - and lights, we think) where we shall probably post this blog. Sure there will be another one before Christmas. Hope it’s not too cold where you are. Stay cool. Love A xxxxxx

PS. Hi there, it’s now Sunday and we are enjoying the loveliness that is St Augustine. We spent the day in the town yesterday and had such a great time; we even sang some carols under the two million white lights decorating the trees! It’s actually a ‘proper’ place, which so many towns we’ve come across in the States are not. It’s a bit touristy, but for some reason it doesn’t matter. It has a Plaza, which is the heart of the town, with narrow cobbled streets radiating off. The Spanish influence is everywhere, which gives it character missing from so many places. Also with a thriving university, housed in what was once one of the poshest hotels in the country (lucky students), the place has a vibrant and buzzy feel, with loads of bars and cafes with live music everywhere. It’s billed as the ‘oldest’ town in the US (so many places say this), but it is pretty old and has been in the hands of the French, Spanish and also the Brits, who were really horrid as they burnt it down!! [so did lots of other people – ed.]. As you can gather we really like it here!

Another couple of places we loved, but unfortunately were only able to drive through as we had our ‘Rock Crusher’ commitment… were Watercolour and Seaside (!?!) Little paradises flanked by the whitest beaches and the bluest sea we’ve seen so far. (We must return!) We can’t believe it’s nearly Christmas; this one is to be the weirdest yet, as we will be totally on our own, amongst unknown people, whom we hope will be friendly and fun! I’m trying to persuade Andy to let me watch ‘The Queen’ on our Tunnel Bear link to British tv (which I’m sure everyone knows is still the best tv in the world!!) The joy I had recently when I watched ‘Location, Location’ in the comfort of the sofa in Molly, while drinking a cup of Tetley’s tea…

I've come to the conclusion that my favourite creatures in the world are pelicans and manatees (who I'd never heard of before), but fell in love as soon as I saw them swimming at the Three Sisters Springs Wildlife Park.

Funnily enough, we haven’t been homesick at all, we are acutely aware of the fact that time is whizzing and we’ll be back in the UK on March 15^th. Before then we have our South American adventure, which we are sooo looking forward to and are in the process of planning. Thanks to our lovely friends Pete and Sue, also Lesley and Andy for all their advice and suggestions. From here we’re heading south to Kissimmee and then by next Friday we ‘hit’ Miami to catch up with more lovely friends, Joelle and Gunter, who are holidaying there for a week. We’re really looking forward to seeing them, not only for the fact that they are bringing us English teabags and chocolate!! Wowee!!

Time to go before I get too excited. Love to all, enjoy the run up to Christmas. Gillie xxxx