Andy & Gillie's Big Adventure!: Merry blah blah blah and all that stuff…

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