AVA Walk #4 Fort Myers

Well, unfortunately, not ALL AVA walks are created equal. On Wednesday, I went for my 4th walk of the trip, this one in downtown Fort Myers. But I didn't end up doing the whole thing. I actually found myself feeling somewhat uncomfortable walking alone in some of the neighborhoods. And I'm smart enough to just turn back when I get to a certain level of discomfort. I would probably have gone on if I hadn't been doing the walk alone. The other thing is-downtown Fort Myers is just not very attractive. The walk route didn't seem to take me to any attractive parks, or past any interesting outdoor sculptures, or anything very nice at all. I probably got in the majority of the 10K but I honestly would not recommend this specific walk to anyone else. I don't really mind THAT much when I occasionally get disappointed by one of the AVA walks, since the majority of them are really, really nice-and I certainly get a pretty good picture of what a town is like, even if the overall impression is negative. So-I don't have any pictures to post from this walk, because there just wasn't anything I felt like taking a picture OF.

So my pictures this time are primarily of Scott and Deb's house. They left on Monday for a few days in Key West-I think they're coming back today but then leaving tomorrow to go up to the Tampa area to spend Christmas with Deb's son. They invited us to make ourselves at home while they were gone and showed us where the spare key is kept. Dave was anxious to try fishing off their wall so we went over there on Tuesday and then he went back on Wednesday, while I did my walk. It was very hospitable of them to open their house to us like this, and we really appreciated it. They have a great winter home here, right on the channel-no grass, very easy upkeep, with a nice patio, their pontoon boat, a fish-cleaning station, a little screened-in gazebo - everything you need for living the good life! Plus they have two very cute cats! I took a few pictures of their place and am posting them.

On Monday, we went to another basketball game at FGCU (Florida Gulf Coast University). It was a double header, with both the women and men's teams playing - we really do enjoy that. And they were running a special-for one additional dollar over the normal price of admission, you got a ticket good for three games between that night and January 15th. One of the three was the one we went to, but we'll definitely be going again on January 7th and January 9th. What a bargain!

Today is Friday, the day before Christmas Eve, and it is SO strange to try to actually BELIEVE that! It is in the mid-80's - as it has been every day since we got here - and the sun is shining like crazy. Dave is out in his kayak fishing right now, and I spent most of the afternoon at the pool. THAT got a little weird too, because there are a few children here now (probably because they're on Christmas vacation from school) and there were a couple of kids playing in the pool-not naughty or anything, but just kind of jumping and splashing a little-and some old lady got all bent out of shape and started in on the parents about the children being "respectful" to the old people who live in the park. It actually got a little unpleasant, and one of the guys from the park office had to step in and he ended up basically threatening to close the pool down if they couldn't reach an agreement. Yikes! I was embarassed for her because she was WAY out of line-the kids really weren't being that bad-and I felt she was giving the rest of us "old people" a bad name. I hope I never get to be that type of a grumpy old thing!!!!! (But would I even know it if I was???? Hmmm....)

So it's been kind of a quiet week-very laid back-very, very warm (low80's-but I'm not complaining!). Plus there are a few pretty nice little bars down here, and we drop in to one of them every couple of days or so. I'm posting a couple pix of our favorite one-the Low Key Tiki Bar. It's kind of neat, because it's under this thatched roof and is totally open to the outside-very "Florida"! Later on this evening, we're be heading over to the American Legion for supper, and I think we'll be going back there on Christmas Day for the potluck-there are probably quite a few people like us who are away from our homes and our family, so it'll probably be kind of nice to at least be with other people on Christmas Day. Plus I'm looking forward to calling my kids and my mom that afternoon. I'm sure my next post won't be until after Christmas, so I hope everyone has a WONDERFUL day and a very merry Christmas. Love to all.....

Christmas Parade

OK, so normally when we're on the road we don't know a soul and we don't really socialize with anyone, other than polite chit-chat along the lines of "that's a cute dog you have there" and "where are you from?". But while we're on Pine Island we actually have friends (!) and we love spending time with them. Scott and Deb are great people- they would literally give you the shirts off their backs without thinking twice. They are wonderful hosts and they LOVE to have a good time. We got onto the island on Tuesday, but we didn't contact Scott and Deb until Friday. We wanted to get settled in a little, plus we knew they had company down from Michigan and didn't want to interfere. But on Friday afternoon, Dave called Scott and told him we should be arriving this coming Monday, but then we surprised them by walking up their driveway about 15 minutes later (Dave LOVES doing this type of thing!). We ended up spending the entire evening with them, hanging out at their great place right on one of the canals. We had WAY too much to drink, but I have to admit we had a ball. It was just great to see them again.

And then, on Saturday, they were taking part in the Christmas boat parade, with about 20 or so boats all decorated for the holiday. The idea is that the boats meet at the local bars (which are all on the water) and they form a parade and go up and down the canals, where the people who live along the canals are sitting with their friends and family and watching all the decorated boats go by. Scott and Deb insisted that we come over on Saturday afternoon and ride on their boat with two other couples (so eight of us in total: Dave and I, Scott and Deb, Mary and Paul, and John and Betty Lou). We agreed-it sounded like fun-so we showed up at 4:30 Saturday afternoon, but we kind of didn't even think about it being a Christmas event, so we didn't have on any of our Christmas "finery" (which, actually, we don't even own). Deb came to the rescue with a couple of Santa Claus hats, so we were good to go. But I think you can tell from the pictures that we were slightly under-dressed for the event. And, yes, Theresa and MaryEllen, Dave DID wear his little elf-hat the WHOLE night!!!!! And it was WAY fun! Deb drove the boat-she normally does and is just an EXCELLENT "captain"- and all the boats went up and down, all lit up and decorated for the occasion. Some of the boats' decorations were just GREAT, but my camera doesn't take good night pictures, so I don't have any to post. There had to have been literally hundreds of people lining the canals and cheering and clapping-and Scott was loving every minute of it, yelling relatively "crude" stuff at everyone as we went by! Scott and Deb's pontoon boat was sponsored by The Ragged Ass, a really fun bar here on the island, so after the parade was done, we all went over there and got free beer and pizza (those of you who know Dave will realize he was VERY happy about this!).

We were supposed to go out on the boat this afternoon (Sunday) for a little run out to Sanibel Island, but it was quite windy so we had to postpone for now. And, frankly, we needed a day off! We must be getting really old because partying both Friday and Saturday EXHAUSTED us-we're REALLY not used to this! When we left a message with Scott that we were taking a raincheck, he called back and told us the American Legion was having a big all-you-can-eat breakfast for only $6 per person. So, yep, we HAD to do that. So all eight of us who were on the boat Saturday night met up again for breakfast-gee, it seemed like a totally different group of people-all of use were fairly quiet, articulate, polite...!

After breakfast we just came back to the rig and hung out the rest of the afternoon. I did a couple loads of laundry while Dave watched some football. Later in the afternoon we went for a nice bike ride from the park down to the end of the island - maybe eight or ten miles total, but one of the first times we've biked together since we left home. It was really nice to just pedal along and chat and look at stuff. I'm posting a picture I took of a palm tree that had all these....things...hanging from it. They kind of look like grapes, but when you get closer they appear to be more like nuts or something-pretty weird-I don't think we've seen anything exactly like it before so I thought I'd throw it onto my page here just for grins.
Anyway...Scott and Deb are leaving tomorrow morning for a few days down in Key West and won't be back until Friday, but they left us keys to their house and invited us to come over and fish or hangout or whatever we want to do. I think we'll be taking them up on the invite-they have two cats and one of them LOVES to come outside, so Dave will fish in the afternoons and I'll let the cat out and sit in a lounge and read my "Nook". It sounds WONDERFUL! And by the time they get back, it'll be just a couple days until Christmas...still hard to believe.

AVA Walk #3-Punta Gorda

Well, we're now at our new "home" for the next 30 days. We actually only moved about 30 miles-up to Pine Island, which is just off the coast on the north side of Fort Meyers. Although we will be spending most of our winter at state parks, this is one of the exceptions-it's actually a KOA RV resort. It's nice, but nothing fancy - however, it DOES have a nice pool, where I plan to spend some major time. It's actually the only place with a pool out of our entire winter, so I definitely have to take advantage of it - I'll post some pix later (but WITHOUT me in the pix!). Anyway, one of the reasons we come here, besides the fact that we simply want to be further south during December and January, is because our friends Scott and Deb live here for the winter and we look forward to spending some time with them. We never want to be an imposition, so we'll not spend a HUGE amount of time with them and in fact we haven't even let them know that we're here yet. But I think we'll try to get in touch with them tomorrow. They're "party people" so I'm sure our alcohol consumption will increase as soon as we hook up with them, but we love them to pieces and are looking forward to seeing them.
So while we're here we'll probably have to do a bit more traveling for day trips because there's not a lot of "stuff" to do on the island. It's great for biking, hanging out at the pool, doing some kayaking, and Dave plans to do some fishing. But there aren't "touristy" things so we'll probably just drive off the island every 2 or 3 days to do our little day trips.
...Which is what we did today. We went up to Punta Gorda, which is actually only about 20 miles straight north once you leave the island. I did the AVA walk up there, while Dave rode his bike around. The starting point for the walk was the Fisherman's Village, which is kind of cute. It's like this big long series of warehouse type of buildings strung together with shops and bars and stuff inside. There's a roof over top of the whole thing, but as you go through the "village" you're actually walking from one building to the next. It's kind of hard to explain, but it was fun to walk through. After my walk was done, we went to the very back, where there's a bar/restaurant called the Pirate's something-or-other (I actually can't quite remember the name, to tell you the truth!) - but, anyway, the bar kind of hangs out into the harbor so boats can pull up and dock and you can sit and eat or drink and which all the boats out in the harbor - quite nice! Beautiful temps (80 AGAIN!) and clear blue sky - lovely!
The AVA walk was very nice-much nicer (in my opinion) than the two I did in Naples - much more interesting and with more "character". The two in Naples are primarily about gorgeous mansions - yawn. But this one took me through the downtown, past a number of interesting murals painted onto the sides of various buildings, some cool parks and sculptures and monuments and then back to the Fisherman's Village by way of a really nice bike path all along the waterfront-actually, an exceptionally nice bike path. Dave rode all around the bike path while I walked, so I really want to come back sometime during the next three weeks and bring my bike along too. Downtown Punta Gorda is older and kind of small, but has some nice buildings and cute bars and restaurants, so it would be fun to come back and just bike the whole thing with Dave. One of the sculptures along the waterfront park commemorated Hurricane Charlie, which slammed into Punta Gorda in 2004 and did massive damage to many of the buildings. The sculpture is two palm trees: one stands upright and the other is bent far over, but not destroyed (just like the town and it's people). Pretty cool!
Anyway - I'm attaching one picture of our RV-there's nothing that special about the picture, but it shows the beautiful sky. The park is surprisingly empty - we were here last year from January 18th thru the 31st and it was quite full. But we're being told that a lot of the rigs don't pull in until after Christmas, so we're enjoying having a LOT of space around us for now! We can actually let Brandi run on a pretty long line because there are so few rigs in our row.
I'm having a hard time believing it's only 10 days until Christmas - it so does NOT feel like Christmas to us down here. But I did ship a couple of Christmas boxes to my kids and their families, so hopefully they'll get a little bit of Christmas cheer from their old mom! And my mother is now out of the hospital, staying with Dolores and Gary for a few days (or weeks) while she recuperates a little. And that's a great Christmas present for me...

Dog Racing and Koreshans...

OK-first, the weather report: we're pretty bummed-we actually had some RAIN (well, ok, some scattered sprinkles) for part of the last two days. But that's okay-we're still doing fine! And it's still been in the mid-70's to low-80's so, gee, I guess we can't really complain too much, huh? Well, we're down to our last two days at this park, and then on Tuesday we'll be moving about 30 miles or so to the north, out onto Pine Island where we'll be for a whole month. In the meanwhile, we're trying to squeeze in a couple of our last "to-do" things down here on the south side of Fort Myers.

One of the things we wanted to do was visit the Naples Dog Racing Track, which we did. It was like visiting a foreign country-we had ABSOLUTELY no idea what was going on. We figured out the basics, i.e. that eight dogs at a time are released from the starting gates and they run (really, REALLY fast!) for about one-and-a-half laps around this track that looks about the same size as a high school track. There's a race every 20 minutes - the handlers (is that right?) bring the dogs out and parade them in front of the stand where the people are seated. Then they take the dogs down to the far end of the track and apparently put them into the starting gates, at which point the dogs start barking like crazy - actually, you can kind of tell they're all excited and seem to be looking forward to racing. Anyway, then the mechanical rabbits come by, the dogs are released, they run like hell and a few seconds later it's all over. Then there's about a 10-minute pause and the whole process is repeated over and over. That's about everything that we could understand-but we had absolutely no idea what in the world was going on as far as the betting and the win-place-show thing. If I thought we'd ever go back, I'd probably go out onto the internet and google "betting on dog races" or something like that - but since I seriously doubt that we ever WILL go back to the track, I guess I'll just forget about it! But the thing we REALLY got a kick out of was how much the dogs look like our little Brandi. I'm posting a picture of one of the race dogs, and a picture of Brandi taken the day before - LOOK AT THEM-THEY'RE IDENTICAL! Wow! No wonder she's so darn FAST!

By the way, the picture of Brandi (and Dave) was taken at the Dog Beach on Lover's Key - this was a really cool dog park because it is actually a stretch of beach right on the Gulf Coast that dogs can run all over on. Brandi LOVED it! There were about 4 or 5 other dogs in the park, and they just ran and ran and jumped in the water and got all wet and sandy - she thought it was GREAT!

Today (Sunday) was really cool-we actually stayed here and went on the ranger-led guided tour of the historic settlement here in the park. The tour costs a whomping $2 per person and would typically last an hour to an hour-and-a-half. However, Dave and I were the only two attendees so our guide (Ranger Claire-there's a picture of her attached) took all the time in the world and we were actually with her for more than three hours. I know-that sounds like a REALLY long time, but it was SO interesting! Dave even hung in there until the last few minutes, at which point he excused himself (using his knee as an excuse) and went back to the RV to watch Sunday football. But he did find it to be very informative and he asked a lot of questions. The tour is definitely worth the time. I could write PAGES of stuff about the Koreshans, but will try to briefly summarize a little bit of what we learned. The settlement was established in 1894 as a community for the Koreshans, who had some excellent ideas and some REALLY weird ones! One of their weird ideas was that the earth is actually a hollow sphere with the sun and moons on the INSIDE and the surface of the earth facing inwards. Outside the sphere is nothing. The globe in the picture was built by them to illustrate their theory or belief. They also believed that their founder, Dr. Cyrus Teed, was a prophet and a messiah and that, upon his death, he would be resurrected. In fact when he died, in 1906, they put his body into a bath tub and let it sit there for a week, waiting for him to come back to life. Yikes! At it's peak, the settlement housed about 250 members - the "ruling group" was celibate and lived in the settlement, but the other members could have families and live outside. One of the beliefs of the group was that God is both male and female and they believed in true equality of the sexes. In fact, after Dr. Teed died, the settlement was ruled by a group of eight people, and seven of them were women! They emphasized education and the arts and had an orchestra and a marching band and put on elaborate plays and musicals. When the original group moved to Florida (from Chicago) they brought a Steinway piano, one of only 4 idential pianos built in 1895. The piano is still on the grounds, in the Art Hall, and is regularly played at concerts that take place in the park. The group was "communal" and all personal property was handed over to the leadership of the group when a person joined, with the understanding that the group would then take of this person for the rest of their life (which they indeed did). The community planted wonderful gardens, in basically three phases: the first phase was for sustenance (food), the second phase was medicinal plants, and the third phase was for beauty. They brought in exotic plants from all over the world. Claire, our guide, spent a lot of time showing us a number of the trees and bushes and plants that are on the grounds, which we were actually very interested in. The settlement also included the Planetary Court, where the rulers lived (the bit yellow house in the picture), a store, a bakery, a small engine shop and a large engine shop, a laundry, a dining hall, and many other buildings. They were very successful commercially. However, after Dr. Teed's death, the colony began to gradually fade out, and by the mid-1960's the colony only had four remaining members. These members persuaded the Florida state government to take title to the land and and all the buildings in the settlement, with the promise the State would establish a permanent monument to the Koreshans. The last remaining member of the colony died in her little house right on the grounds in 1982 (remember, the park was actually established in the late 1960's so she lived in the state park for around 15 yearsand even gave many of the tours right up to the time of her death) and she is buried on the grounds. It's an absolutely fascinating story and we're so glad we finally took the time to learn more about it before we leave. We really do enjoy doing this type of thing while we're traveling-we feel like we have the chance to learn SO much on our trips. Plus it's SO much fun! So, anyway-next stop: Pine Island.

PS-as I write this post, my mother is in the hospital being treated for a nasty blood infection - please pray for a speedy recovery for her. We love you, Mom!

Another AVA Walk in Naples

Well, we continue to have oustanding weather down here - it's been in the upper 70's to low 80's, mostly sunny, every day! This is SO different from last year, when we spent the whole month of December on Cedar Key-it was SO chilly for almost the entire month. There were many mornings when Brandi's water dish outside was frozen in the morning. But this year has been just unreal. We are SO happy that this year is off to such a better start.

My last post talked about doing my first AVA walk of the year, in Naples. Well, Naples actually has two walks, so I did the second one today. I liked it better than the first one, but two-thirds of it was still walking along residential streets. YES... I KNOW the houses are gorgeous, but I much more enjoyed the last third of the walk, which took me down a long boardwalk from Clam Pass Park (which is essentially a place to park your car) out to the beach. There were three trams that just run back and forth, taking people out to the beach - but NO, I did NOT jump onto the tram - I WALKED! Then I got to walk along the beach for a while before heading back to Gulf Shore Boulevard for more mansions and resorts. This walk is more on the north side of Naples (I think it might be in Naples Park), and it was kind of interesting because a lot of the layout is sort of Venetian in style, with houses and shops built out onto the water on big pylons (...is that spelled right?). The shops and stuff are fantastic, of course, and the landscaping is quite breathtaking. In fact, I had to kind of chuckle because the only people I really saw outside (other than me, of course) are the lawn maintenance guys. Now THAT is a career that must have a lot of job security down here - the grounds are always gorgeous and there are always, ALWAYS guys doing yard and ground work. Ah, how lovely it is to walk down a beautiful residential street with the sound of lawn mowers and weed wackers keeping you company. I'm posting a few pictures from the walk just to give my poor Northern friends a little taste of the sunsine and palm trees. When my walk was done, I had a nice chat with the gal who was working at the Ben and Jerry's (the "start point" for my walk today). She was telling me that right after the holidays the population down here is going to literally double, due to the inflooding of the "winter residents". She warned me to be "very defensive" about traffic when I'm walking in a couple weeks.

So what else have we done in the last couple days??? Well, on Sunday we kind of hung around and did some errands and made a brief visit to the Bluegrass Festival that was going on over in the historic section of the park. The festival was Saturday and Sunday, and I think some of the attendees camped in the park because Friday night and Saturday night we could hear the sound of fiddles and banjos wafting on the breeze. Monday we did some laundry while we waited for the Direct TV guy to come back and fix our satellite dish (for the last time, PLEASE!) and then we dumped the kayaks in and took a paddle downriver (as opposed to upriver, which we did a few days ago). Downriver is not as interesting as upriver because there are more houses, boats and the river widen outs. But we did spot a mother raccoon and her babies waddling along the bank, which was kind of fun.

Yesterday (Tuesday) we went for a road trip and drove down to Collier-Seminole State Park, which is down by Marco Island, to see if it might be someplace for us to stay in upcoming years. Well, it's a good thing we checked it out because it is definitely NOT someplace we would enjoy - it is way, WAY south of just about anything, right on the very edge of the Everglades. We do like our privacy and we like being out in "nature", but BOY this park is REALLY secluded. Great park for some people, but not us. We agreed that Koreshan, where we are now, is probably as far south as we need to go. After we left the state park, we drove out to Bonita Beach and checked out a couple of the public beaches, along with Lovers Key State Park. The state park was nice - I took Brandi for a 2-1/2 mile nature walk- but there's no camping or anything. But definitely a nice place to spend a day at the beach. We are planning on a full beach day pretty soon - we had Brandi with us on Tuesday so couldn't do very much beach time but definitely found a couple places we like for later.

Tonight I got a nice phone call from my very, VERY busy daughter - it was great to get a live up-date on everyone instead of just gleaning info from Facebook (...but thank God for Facebook!). I'm so proud of her and how great her bakery is doing - if anyone reading this has not visited her Facebook or website, do yourself a favor and take a look at Brenda's Cakes on Facebook or visit her website at brenscakes.com. But be careful - I think you can literally put on weight just looking at her beautiful cakes and cookies!!!! OK-that's it for today - I'll be back in a couple days.

First AVA Walk of the Trip

Wow - I can't believe I've done 43 AVA walks already - they are just the coolest thing to do when you're traveling. Yesterday I did one of the two walks in Naples. But before I talk about that, I have to mention how much I'm loving my new I-phone on this trip. I used the Weather Channel app multiple times on the way down here, I used the Walmart app to find the Walmarts for our overnight stops, I used the Around Me app to find a bar one night (we ended up at a kind of cheesy Hooters, but that wasn't the fault of the app!), and I know I used it other times too. I know it's a little "pricey" and indulgent to have the I-phone, but BOY is it fun!
Anyway - on Thursday we were just kind of hanging out because we spent the ENTIRE morning with the guy from Direct TV, so hadn't made afternoon plans - so I decided to go to my Dog Park Finder app and see if there were any dog parks within a reasonable distance. And - SO COOL! - sure enough, there was a really nice park barely a mile away - and I never EVER would have known about it without the app. I used the map app a number of times - to find the specific starting point for my AVA walk, to find the nearest Best Buy and Radio Shack (more "technology" trouble-don't ask!) and to pinpoint the locations for the FGCU campus (Florida Gulf Coast University). And REALLY cool - this afternoon Theresa called me and we used FaceTime to see our friends back up in Holland - hanging out at the bar (big surprise!), and I was able to show them our camp site, and the palm trees, and I even made the cat and dog say hi to them. Technology can make me insane (like today-when the DirectTV satellite blew over in the wind and I haven't been able to get the signal back since - GGGRRRR!), but at other times technology is just GREAT!
So - anyhow - we did take Brandi to the dog park on Thursday afternoon and she had a great time chasing all her new friends all over the park. It was really cute - and when we get back from that she is completely, TOTALLY exhausted and basically sleeps all the rest of the day.
And then yesterday we went down to Naples, which is only about 20 miles, and I got to do my first AVA walk of this trip. Dave rode his bike while Brandi and I did the walk, but unfortunately he didn't end up totally thrilled with the ride - but he always realizes that some AVA walks give him good biking opportunities, and some not so much... I enjoyed the walk overall... probably 50% of it was walking along Gulf Shore Drive, which is basically a chance to ooh and aah at the multi-, multi-million dollar mansions along the edge of the coast. I don't mind walking past all of them, but honestly once you've seen one of these incredible mansions you've kind of seen them all - just great big, expensive, beautiful homes that I can't even begin to identify with. But the second half of the walk took me out to the pier (which I couldn't actually go out onto because I had the dog with me but at least could stand at the end of it and look up and down the beach, which was nice), past the Palm Cottage, the oldest home in Naples (built in 1895), over to the City Docks area and then through a few blocks of the very-nice downtown shopping area. It probably wasn't my absolute favorite AVA walk, but it was just SO nice to be back out on one of them that I ended up having a great day. And it helps that the weather was picture perfect too!
Today I spent a lot of the day trying to get the Direct TV picture back (failed so far!) but we left about 4:30 to head over to the afore-mentioned FGCU campus for two basketball games - the men played first, followed by the women. What a beautiful campus - we found out the college is only 13 years old, so everything is really pretty and new. The campus is slightly outside of town, to the east of I-75, and appears to be pretty large - the student body is apparently around 14,000 or so. The games were played in the Alico Arena, which was quite nice (honestly, not as nice as Hope's arena, but frankly we haven't found any college arenas as nice as Hope's!). We bought general admission tickets and then, after the men's game, we moved to better seats for the women's game. Well, apparently we actually moved into reserved seats so this nice older staff guy pointed that out to us and we got to talking to him and he ended up having us just move one row backwards to his brother-in-law's seats! All the people around us were really friendly and Dave had a great time critiquing all the shots and sharing comments with the other guys - it was pretty fun. There was one girl who made eight 3-point shots during the game-unreal! (I think they were announcing that she had just broken the school record for 3-pointers as we were walking out.) There are a few more home games between now and when we leave Pine Island on January 13, so I'm sure we'll come back for at least another one or two games. I love it that we find these local games to go to while we're on the road - it just adds another dimension to our travels - and it's big time fun for us! That's it for now....