Shakedown

We decided to take another “shakedown” trip since I was off for a long weekend. Saturday, we stayed close by at the Huntsville Space and Rocket center. I heard about this campground from one of my patients. I think it is about 25 spaces with full hookups and is $15/night. Not bad. In the field next to the campground, the space camp kids set off their home made rockets which is fun to watch. Anyway, we got there around 11:30 and found a spot. And then after leveling problems, proceeded to change the spot to the next one over. The campground stays full most of the year so all the prime spots were taken and we were left with our choice of the two in the middle. Now, this campground is set up like a circle with a few spots the the middle. I’m sure we looked silly to the experienced campers as we fumbled around with our new motorhome. A few even came out to watch! In the evening, we went to the Huntsville Symphony. The program included The Planets and some themes from Star Wars. It was a lot of fun.

Sunday morning, we broke camp and set out for DeSoto State Park. We towed the jeep for the first time, which a high anxiety producing situation for me. And by the way, we filled gas for the first time on Saturday. The price per gallon was about $2.89/gallon…75 gallon tank…enough said. Back to DeSoto and the towing, Mike did a very good job driving. We even managed to stop at a grocery store and make it back out of the parking lot! Call me crazy but it's the little things that make me happy. It took us about 2 hours to get here, so that is the longest we’ve driven the RV to date. All in all, it went well. We found a nice, wooded, secluded campsite and went out to see the area. Sites included DeSoto Falls, and the Little River Canyon, which a National Preserve. Unfortunately, we don't have many photos because the camara battery died the day we got there. The photo above was the last one we got.

Tow bar installation project complete

This weekend Mike and I installed the tow apparatus on the jeep. It took a couple of hours. I had no idea there was so much plastic on my jeep! I kind of wish I still didn't know. I felt safer when I thought it was more sturdy.

House, half sold

Last Tuesday, while in Florida, we got two offers on our house. One fell through right away because it couldn't compete with the second offer. Anyway, after a busy week of travelling back and forth to Kinko's in Melbourne, FL (we had no other means of printing and faxing contracts) we finally had a contract signed on our house. Unfortunatly, it is contingent on the other party selling their house, which is across the neighborhood from ours. We didn't really want a contingency but we have Right of First Refusal, which means that we will continue to show our house and if another party wants to buy it, the first party will have two days to either buy our house outright or cancel their contract. Hopefully their house will sell quickly, they have until July 4th according to the contract.

Late note: We noticed later that our house was no longer listed on the public MLS site, probably due to the fact that there is a contract pending. That sucks. Also, the house down the street is now under contract. These two factors have lead to a significant drop in traffic through our house. So now we are really hoping that other house sells soon.

Florida review

Monday was Epcot center and lots of fun. Tues we lounged around the pool at the house and Mike and I checked out Fort Wilderness at Walt Disney World. Later in the evening we all headed out for dessert at the top of the Contempory hotel in WDW. Mike, Tracy, Phillip, Mike’s dad, John and I had the best view of the Magic Kingdom's fireworks. I heard about it from a friend of mine and it turned out to be great idea.

Wednesday, Mike and I drove to the beach condo at Melbourne beach and stayed there through Sunday. It was just the two of us for the rest of the vacation (nobody else wanted to come).

The craziest thing happened though, Mike and I decided to go for a romantic walk on the beach one night. The moon was out over the water and the sky was clear. The temperature was perfect and there wasn’t much wind. Now, normally, I wouldn’t have taken a flashlight, but we were going to look for crabs and stuff, so Mike brought one along. Naturally, I took off my flip flops to walk in the sand. As we neared the water, some seaweed caught my eye and then, as I glanced over at it, I realized it was big snake, curled up in the sand! Mike was about a foot from it and almost stepped on it! Well that was it for me, I went straight back up to the condo! Now, this may be naïve, but I had no idea that there was even the remotest possibity that a snake could be on the beach! Mike and I tried to identify it from some photos on the internet and we think it was possibly a cottonmouth. That may have been my last stroll on the beach in the dark.

Orlando in April

We set out for Florida on Friday to meet up with some of Mike's family in Orlando for the week. What we thought would be a 10 hour drive turned to 13 hours and we were in the jeep, not the motorhome! Atlanta traffic was horrible! And it was 3pm in the afternoon. We finally made it to Orlando, took a wrong turn, drove through some pretty seedy neighborhoods, and finally made it to the hotel to meet Tracy and Phillip (Mike’s sister and husband). We hung around Orlando on Sat. and Sun until we could get into the rental house and enjoy the pool. Here's Mike taking in some sun and relaxing. We couldn't have picked a better week as far as the weather. It was beautiful!