April 6th- May 1st

Sorry to be absent with posts as of late. We are definitely embracing our new normal! Heck, we’re almost locals now!

We are learning about all the local marine life, socially distancing with another FT RV family with 4 kids, riding bikes, working out each morning, crabbing, watching the sunsets, flying kites (and untangling them from the top of our camper), putting up bunk-hammocks, FaceTiming with friends and family, getting rad tans, draining bottles of sunscreen and bug spray and staying busy with schoolwork. From cross-country travelers to Florida snowbirds, we are still having our adventure! After all, we DID say at the beginning of our trip that we wanted to explore life a little differently! (2020 Understatement of the Year!)

Our RV park went from about 70 to 50 to 40 to 30 and finally to 18 reservations onsite. Things started picking back up again on Friday 4/24 as reservations (with stipulations) were being honored to allow more campers in the park. It’s safe to say that we all felt as though we’re our own little quarantined family. Having been here for 5+ weeks with those remaining few, we’re all getting to know each other a little bit better. And these past few weeks have been FULL of adventure.

A huge thank you to Nana Bear & Papa Bear as well as Grandma and Grandpa, Uncle Chris and Uncle Dan, Kelly and Chris Reynolds (great virtual happy hour!) Uncle John, Leigh, cousins Ava, Annalise and Max (love the puppy!), AK, Matthew Curtis, Avery and Teagan, Heather F. and everyone else who has been actively staying in touch with us on this journey. We love you all and it feels good to connect and be in all of this together. Thank goodness for FaceTime and Google Duo!

How was your Easter Sunday? Izzy decided that we really needed to still have Easter and that everyone at the park needed to know that even if they weren’t celebrating with their loved ones, they were special to us. She and I set off to make 40 little Easter Goody Bags for those campers who were stuck like us. Each baggie had a clam shell with a piece of corral hot-glued inside with super sparkly glue colors along with a little ‘Happy Easter’ note and an origami bird. She finished each bag off with 1-2 little Dove Chocolates. We delivered all of these on a windy, Sunday morning. Izzy had her light up egg necklace and light up ears too. When no one was home, we simply took a little painters tape and found somewhere to tape them down that the campers would see them when they got back. What we didn’t expect was how folks reciprocated. Steve brought us frozen snickers bars (he just had lung surgery to remove cancer and is high risk), Dan and Debbie gave Izzy a bunch of shells and a few plastic chick eggs and a bucket, she received Kit Kat bars, thank you notes, and the list goes on and on. It really warmed our hearts to hear how much it warmed the hearts of others. Hey, if nothing more, it’s an excellent lesson that love works and connecting with others can be done in so many different ways. Dan and Debbie shared in the joy of watching the kiddos search for eggs that the Easter Bunny had left for them that morning.

Our next adventure was our BBQ with Mark, Barb Seuss and Smitty. After being socially isolated with everyone for 4 weeks, we needed little bit of sanity and to do something ANYTHING that allowed us to connect with PEOPLE in person. Barb and Mark are from Tennessee and they smoked some absolutely AMAZING ribs. We all sat around together and shared a meal. We also handed off a bottle of King’s Estate Pinot Gris and another bottle of Kettle One to Seuss and Smitty as a thank you – Smitty had gone fishing one day and caught so much trout and red fish he decided to share a gallon bag full of fillets with us. It fed our family for two nights! It was so wonderful to share some laughs and give each other a little bit of normalcy complete with cocktails, stories, great eats, big laughs, smooth country music and some good ol’ fashioned sunshine. With only 3500 people in our entire county and one confirmed (and not hospitalized) case of the virus and everyone in great health for 4 weeks socially distancing, we decided we would take our chances on our local RV family for some socially distant din-din.

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Presnells has a popular marina and Izzy, Ben and I had been coveting all the fish the guides and fishermen were bringing in each day. They’d filet them right at the cutting table off of the marina. Clark has taken to kayaking out early on the weekends. He caught a few brown trout and we cooked them up for dinner. Clark also gave me a hall pass and let me fish with Smitty again for a few hours in the evening. Caught two trout!

The beaches were officially opened on Friday, April 24th and folks were allowed to go to them daily between 6-9am and 5-8pm. Still, it’s pretty ironic to us that there are any restrictions at all. We are in the ‘Forgotten Coast’ and it’s name is fitting- there’s hardly anyone around. We headed out to do some shell hunting and to walk the 1.1 miles to the beached shrimp boat and only saw 4 other folks. Hurricane Michael came through PSJ about two years ago and there’s still significant rebuilding going on. One of the major aftereffects of the Hurricane was to Cape San Blas and the beach there. About 200 yards of beach, going into the adjacent forest was sucked back into the ocean. Twisted tree trunks are all that remain and the tide has come in far closer than it ever did before.

Another dimension to our trip that hasn’t been expected is the weather. The water (and air) in the Gulf is warmer than it’s ever been for this time of year, which means more opportunity for tornadoes and much earlier than usual. We had our first tornado watch as well as our first 50+ mile gust hit the camper. We didn’t sleep a wink. I don’t have the stomach for it, nor does Clark. We do know that the employees at Presnells keep the clubhouse open when big storms come through. The clubhouse survived Hurricane Michael, which was a category 5 storm. When I’ve asked the locals about the storms we have, they say, ‘oh that? that’s just a gust’. Oy vey!!! I did have some folks also teach us the value of our location along the cape. St. Joseph Bay is pretty well protected from storms coming in off the ocean because the water is that much more shallow. The storms lose much of their energy once they break through the cape and are more often than not pushed northwest to Mexico Beach. Still, I’ll take fires, volcanoes and snow any day over hurricanes and tornadoes. And for now, I’ll take the Florida Sunsets (w/o the bugs!)

And of course, one can never have an RV without a black tank fiasco. Let’s just say that these first time RVers learned the hard way that toilet paper needs plenty of water to break down sewage. We had a TP pyramid blockage of the ages. How many RVers does it take to clear a blocked black tank? Apparently 8. 1 to make a mistake, 2 to clean it up, 1 to document the entire event and 4 there to laugh and offer moral support. Welcome to our RV life! Rainbows, sunshine and black tanks, oh my! The faint of heart may want to skip these photos. The shots of me in the ocean are from cleaning our hose support. The ocean giveth and the ocean taketh away!

Next post will include some more details of our Smokey and the Bandit trip home. While discussing how to go about heading home safely, we met another RV couple, Steve and Erin from Ohio, who told us about RV Trip Wizard as well as Harvest Hosts. RV Trip Wizard allows you to map your entire route and include points of interest like camp sites, RV dump stations, travel centers (think Pilot, Flying J) and other rest stops. It also allows you to set filters of how many miles and what your MPG are so you can route by sensitivity to time on the road, distance between stops and total miles you want to drive in a day. Harvest Hosts is a fabulous website that helps RVers experience life off the beaten path. They specialize in hosted boon-docking for travelers looking to see wineries, farms, breweries & smaller museums. Originally, we of course wanted to visit all the major points of interest, but to head home, we really want to keep our exposure to hot spots at a minimum. So back-country and small towns, here we come! More on this next time. We don’t leave until May 30th and plan to high-tail it to Wyoming and spend a little time with some dear friends in Montana.

Hugs!