Koreshan State Park

Well, we are all settled into our new "home" for the next two weeks. We are at Koreshan State Park, which is in the southern edge of Fort Myers (in Estero, to be exact). It's a really nice park, with a boat ramp right into the Estero River, a very nice little hiking trail along the river, and an interesting historic collection of buildings that used to house the Koreshan Unity Settlement. This was a religious group (shall we say "cult") formed in 1880 in upstate New York. The group believed that the entire universe existed within a giant hollow sphere - oh boy!!!! The 200 followers moved to this location in 1894, where they flourished until 1908 when the leader, Dr. Cyrus Teed, died. In 1961, the final FOUR members of the group deeded the property to the Sate of Florida for a park and memorial. We haven't toured the buildings yet, but the nature trail ends at the settlement. There are a couple of pretty little footbridges that cross over a shallow ravine and go into the community, where about a dozen buildings stand and can be explored via a guided ranger-led tour or simply on a self-guided tour. We'll do this within the next few days, for for now we've just walked the trails and gone on our first kayak ride of the trip. The trail goes through a really cool stand of bamboo.... "trees"? I know they aren't relaly trees, but these bamboo plants are HUGE - they have to be 50, 60 feet tall at least. And when they sway back and forth in the wind, they make this beautiful sound almost like wind chimes - very unique - we've really never seen anything quite like these things before.

The river itself is very pretty; if you launch and go to the right you are headed upriver and the river gets narrower and really beautiful with lots of overhanging trees and tropical growth. If you go to the left you are headed out toward the Estero Bay. For today, we went upriver on a slow, easy paddle. We were about 30 minutes into our ride when Dave spotted a fishing lure hanging from a branch (this makes him VERY happy!) so he HAD to go over and try to retrieve it. Unfortunately the lure was slightly higher than he could reach while sitting in the kayak, so he climebed OUT of the kayak and pushed it over to me to "hold on to". OK, I'm a decent kayaker, but holding onto his paddle, his kayak and trying to paddle backwards against the (admittedly light) current DIDN'T work too well! So there we were - Dave is standing in the water (with his new lure!) and I'm trying to get myself and HIS kayak back to him, when three young guys came out to the river's edge from the outfitter that we just happened to be doing all this in front of. One guy looked at Dave standing in the water, smiled and said "Man, you did SOMETHING wrong, didn't you?" I explained to the kid that this was NOT about making a kayaking mistake-this was ALL about retrieving a fishing lure. Well, the kids TOTALLY got it then - apparently anything is acceptable while in pursuit of a free lure - so they snagged me, pulled me over to them, gave Dave's kayak a big push to shoot it over to him - he crawled back in, everyone was happy, and we kept going. Oh boy...our first adventure :-)

So anyway, everyone is happy - I've been taking Brandi out for a nice walk every morning and night, and our spoiled-rotten-cat Dickens is loving hanging out in his kitty-castle. Yep, we brought it along and he thinks he is "the man" now - he can hang out over the edge of his little box-in-the-sky and watch us mere mortals going on about our business. Vixen never seems to know where she is or what's going on, so she's perfectly content anyplace, especially if she can lay on TOP of the computer, where it's nice and warm and making that wonderful humming sound.

The only fly in the ointment so far has been that of COURSE we've run into our first "technology" problem already. Last year we bought a nice new HD TV for the RV and upgraded our Direct TV service to HD, which meant we got a new dish-one with 3 of the "prongs" or whatever they are. Well, when we got down here and got set up and went to get the satellite dish out of the trunk of the car, we found that we had packed the wrong one - the non-HD dish - so I had to call Direct TV and schedule a service call for them to bring us another new dish and get it all installed. Good grief! The guy is coming tomorrow morning so HOPEFULLY we'll be all set after that - it seems like there are always, ALWAYS, technology problems for us on each trip.

But the weather is gorgeous - the 10 day outlook is sunny every day with temps in the 70's to low 80's. Gorgeous! So thus begins another trip-life is good.

So, anyway, using my newly-developed map-pasting skill, this is where we are now:


View Koreshan State Park in a larger map

Almost There....

We are now in Adel, GA at Reed Bingham State Park. This has kind of turned into our annual tradition - drive 2 full days, then pull over for a day or so at Reed Bingham. We left Columbus Friday morning and had a nice, uneventful drive down to just south of Knoxville, TN, where we stayed overnight at a somewhat scary Walmart. On Saturday we drove through Atlanta and once again had a pretty easy drive down here to Adel. We were pretty pleased with the road conditions on Saturday, because last year we had the exact same schedule and ran into absolutely horrible traffic starting with just south of Atlanta - stop and go for the next 100 miles - it was awful. I was kind of afraid that this is just what you get when you travel south on the Thanksgiving weekend. But thankfully I was wrong - the traffic was fairly heavy, but moved smoothly with no delays at all. Whew!

After two days of non-stop traveling we're always ready for a little break, and this park is perfect for that. The park is about 10 miles off I-75, and about 40 miles north of the Florida state line. So tomorrow we'll get up at a decent time and hit the road - we hope to make it down to the Sarasota/Bradenton area by late tomorrow afternoon and will probably pull over into the Walmart overnight; then on Tuesday we'll do the last 100 miles or so to get to Fort Myers fairly early in the afternoon. I'm dreading it a little, because it sounds like it's going to rain pretty much all day and I really do NOT like traveling in the rain. But the good news is if it gets too bad we'll just pull over - no big deal. One of the things that's so nice about having such a long time frame for the trip is we can afford to sit out a day or two whenever we want to - totally unlike the poor folk who have to rush down, spend a few days, and rush back home all in the space of a week. Honestly, we can't even IMAGINE!

So our day here has been great - sunny all day, high in the mid-70's. I love the trails here so did a little jog this morning and then took Brandi out on the trails for probably two hours. It was great to be out walking with just a T-shirt and shorts. Another thing that's kind of unique about this park is it actually has cable at each site, so Dave took a nice long bike ride earlier and then got to catch a couple of Sunday football games.

We took a little ride into town - and I DO use that term loosely - for a few groceries. Once again, we are always kind of shocked at some of the poverty in these small southern towns. One of the kind of weird things we do sometimes is look at the food in the grocery stores and try to figure out how the "locals" eat - I know, kind of a strange thing to do, huh? Anyway, we were amazed on some of the "pork" things in the meat case - like pig STOMACH, pig FEET, pig EARS, something called "pork trimmings" which looks like a big thick strip of fat about an inch thick, six inches wide and a couple feet long, and lots of other bizarre-looking things - REALLY icky looking! What DO these people DO with this stuff? Ugh!

On our way back to the park, we pulled over to look at one of the cotton fields - it always seems so strange to us to drive by these huge fields that look like they have Johnson & Johnson cotton balls laying all over them. The field we looked at had already been picked (harvested?) and the cotton was mushed into these huge bales. I'm attaching a picture with me standing in front of it for perspective. When you walk up to it, it looks like a jillion, trillion cotton balls all mashed together.

Anyway, we LOVE being back south again and look forward to crossing into Florida tomorrow. My next post should be from Koreshan State Park on the south side of Fort Myers. This park is pretty interesting (it's the site of an old "religious" colony), so on my next post I'll have some pictures and little of the history.

PS-per a suggestion from my daughter, I am going to TRY to put in a Google map of each spot we stay at. Wish me luck-this REALLY challenges my technical abilities!

View Adel, GA in a larger map

Oops-Forgot the Pictures!

I guess I'm a little out of practice with this. And of COURSE everyone wants to see the pictures!!!! So here they are...

Happy Thanksgiving

Well, as usual, our plans turned out just slightly different than anticipated. We had originally planned to take a run down to Columbus, spend a couple peaceful days with Brenda and her family, and then take off on I-75 for places south after eating a big Thanksgiving dinner cooked by my daughter. Well.... a few days before Thanksgiving Arnie (my son-in-law) was FINALLY diagnosed with an infected gall bladder, after suffering for almost four years with stomach pains. He ended up being scheduled for surgery on Tuesday to have his gall bladder removed. If everything had gone perfectly, the surgery would have been done on an outpatient basis. However, since he was literally FULL of gallstones, and his gall bladder was quite horribly infected, they ended up doing a big incision and keeping him in the hospital until Thursday. Plus, Brenda is really busy with her new bakery right now, so things got just a little hectic (but everything turned out fine in the end).
We had a relatively uneventful drive down to Columbus, other than the fact that it rained the great majority of the trip, which is always a little stressful when you're driving an RV and pulling a car behind. But we made it down to Buck Creek State Park in Springfield, Ohio, in about 6-1/2 hours, which was pretty good. We got set up and Brenda and Tessa and the oh-so-adorable little Emma stopped in about 9:00 that night to show off the baby! Brenda had spent the majority of the day at the hospital with Arnie and Tessa ran the bakery for her. Arnie wasn't feeling too good Tuesday night so Brenda stayed at the hospital overnight and got up at 5:00 AM to head back to the bakerty to stock it for the day and get some cake orders done for customers. Dave and I headed out to the bakery in the morning and got there around 11:00, got underfoot for a while, and then took Emma with us so the two girls could work in peace. Dave went back to the campground and got in a little fishing (it was gorgeous sunshine all afternoon) and I took Emma home, made a couple pumpkin pies and played with the baby. I had kind of forgotten how a little three-month old baby can totally consume your time! But what a little sweetie she is!
On Thanksgiving, we took Brandi with us and let her play in Brenda's fenced-in yard with her two dogs and we all pitched in and got dinner started. At about 11:00 Arnie called and said he'd been released so Brenda went and got him, while Dave and I finished the majority of the dinner (although Brenda ordered me to wait on the gravy until she got there!). But after all was said and done, we had a great dinner, Chelsey and Ashley were there, Arnie did remarkably well and the day was really wonderful. It was great to see Chelsey and talk to her about school (she'll be a "buckeye" in January, as a junior in the pre-vet program) and her work at the Humane Society - she looks and sounds wonderful! And of course it was wonderful to spend time with the whole family - it makes me sad to think I won't see any of them until next spring, so my "thanks" for "thanksgiving" are that my family is happy and well and everything is going well, after some tough struggles earlier in the year. (My only regret is that I can only be in one place at a time, so wasn't able to spend any time with Alan and his family, or with my mom and the rest of the family at the big family Thanksgiving dinner at my sister's house.)
And, now! Off to Florida! We'll pull up tomorrow morning and head down I-75, probably stay Friday night south of Knoxville, Saturday night somewhere in southern Georgia, and be at our first state park in the Fort Meyers area on Tuesday. Wish us luck! Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and hopefully my next update will be from Koreshan State Park.

Getting Ready to Leave

Today is Sunday, November 20, and we're just about packed and ready to leave. We plan on leaving Tuesday morning for Columbus, so tomorrow should just involve doing the final steps like filling the water tank, loading up the kayaks and bikes, and transferring the food to the refrigerator and freezer. Although we're pretty good at this by now, each year we do a couple things differently - for one thing, this year we're going to take Dickens' "kitty tower" along. I'm sacrificing my little rolling file cabinet and giving those few precious feet of floorspace to Dickens - what a nice mom, huh? And this year the major food-related emphasis is going to be carbs and sugar! I came in with a slightly higher sugar level at my physical this year, so right now I am all about getting that down a little lower. It'll be fun to see how healthy we can eat on this trip - I even found room for my food processer, and, of course, I can't leave home this year without my Keurig! Last year, I worked about 20 hours a week for Kerkstra, but this year I only plan on helping out "as needed" - we'll have to see what that ends up being! But it does mean that I don't have to pack the VERY large amount of files and binders that I did last year.
Dave had his knee left knee replaced about 10 weeks ago and is doing very well with his recovery, so we're optimistic that he'll be able to start biking and walking as soon as we get to Florida. He's already done some biking up here, so he's feeling really good about the prospects when we get down there. Other than his surgery (which actually went very well), we had a really good summer - I did a lot of work for Kerkstra again this year, which was great. This was my fourth summer working for them, and it's just been a great experience for me. I love the people I work with there (and, yes, I know some of you are reading my blog, so you'll think I'm just pandering to you, but it really is true). But it's starting to get PRETTY chilly these days and it is TIME for us to hit the road.
The first step, just like last year, is to spend Thanksgiving with Brenda and her family in Columbus - and this year I hope to spend the majority of those few days holding my brand-new little great-grandbaby Emma! Plus, Brenda's opened her new bakery since the last time I was down there, so I'm VERY excited to check that out. We should be down in Columbus by early afternoon on Tuesday, we'll spend Wednesday and Thursday with the family, and then Friday morning we jump on I-75 and stay pretty much on it until we get to Fort Meyers.
So that's our plan! Hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving and I'll post again once we get on the road - expect Emma pictures on the next post!