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...
No comments:
Post a Comment