Skidaway Island Camp site

Our camp site at Skidaway Island State Park was huge. The sandy area is the tent pad. This is a pull through site, #60.

Hung up some hammocks for talking and relaxing. It's the first time we have been able to use our hammock, it's not allowed at Florida State Parks to hang things in trees. We ended up with two areas, the hammocks were daytime hangouts since that area had shade during most of the day, and the fireside was used more at night. Chairs got moved back and forth as needed, especially the yellow rocking chair.

View of the vehicles from the hammock. The picnic table was a long one, longer than our tablecloth.

Set up a dishwashing station because the bathroom sink is tiny and the kitchen sink doesn't work. 

Fauna checking us out.

There was a oak stump that she was throwing at, but it's surprisingly hard to get the knives to stick.

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Birthday Camping

Last month I noticed on the trip that the middle tire on the passenger side was wearing unevenly.  Obviously the bogie arm (Suspension piece that holds the wheel) is bent.   What I don't know is how long it has been that way.   The tires have about 5-6K miles on them as they went on right when I bought the coach.   It probably was not bent when the wheels went on as the brakes and bearings were all replaced and I think they would have noticed.   Anyway on our eclipse trip I hit a big pothole on that side which took off one of the exhaust tips (see pic).

As you can see from the photo on the right, how bad it is.  That's not a photo effect, the tire is slanted that much!  It falls right over if you let it go.

I had the spare on the steel wheel you see above.  The tire is like brand new and is just reaching the end of it's 6 year life. (If you don't check date codes on your tires, you need to go google how to do it!).  As I just bought another, this one will be my sacrificial lamb to see how bad of a bend this is.  Hopefully in the next thousand miles or so, I will get new airbags so this will all be apart anyway.....

So prior to leaving on went the spare and it's still there, coach ran fine on it.

Used to be this park always had availability, but the word has gotten out and you need to book a few months in advance now.   I had booked this weekend not because it was my birthday weekend (birthday was actually the Monday after), but the week before with the new moon was sold out.

I was fine with a quarter moon, as it's easy to find in the telescope and offers up some very very cool things to see.  The weather cooperated both nights this trip which was a bonus as our friends Beth and Lee were coming up as well.

Normally, I take a half day off of work and try to be on the road by 1PM, but my daughter talked me into bringing her friend along.  We had to wait for her to get out of school and be driven over by her Mom.  They were actually a few minutes earlier than they said and  we were out of the driveway by 3:25PM.   The drive up was uneventful with good traffic and no mishaps.  Didn't stop at all as I wanted to make up a little time and sure enough we rolled through the gates of the park right around 5:40PM 

They had regraded the gravel up to the turn (couple of miles) so it was easy driving in, but had the girls close the windows as it was very dusty.   After the turn, they had not regraded from the previous month and the washboard slowed us down alot.  This was good as it was twilight and we saw something like 7 or 9 deer on the way to the campground.

Naya was a big help when we arrived as I barked out orders and she executed.  It's a fairly easy affair setting up the coach on arrival.  Block the wheels, plug in electric and hook up water.  Got that done and UH-OH!, no power.  Hmmm,  checked the breaker outside and reset it and still nothing.  Decided to check the plug on the inside.  The PO (previous owner) had done wire work and the 25ft cord that you pull out to plug in, actually has a female outlet on the other end.  There is then another male plug on ROMEX that plugs into that and goes to the breaker panel.  Of course it's under the floor in the closet so I had to empty the whole closet out (where we pack MOST of our stuff while traveling) and sure enough, it had rattled loose on the washboard road.  PHEEEEWWW!

So now that I lost 10 min of daylight,  I'm all in a hurry to get the telescope out before it gets too dark (It gets VERY dark in the park).  We get out the wagon and load the telescope and the girls pull it over to the field (about 100 yards away).   I carry over the tripod and start getting stuff together.  It's been a year since I had the rig set up, so I'm not going real fast.   

Look the Moon!

We get the heavy lifting part done of setting the tripod, equatorial wedge and mounting the scope to the wedge.  It's now that I realize my 12V power pak (for jumping cars, etc) does not have a built in inverter (I thought it did).  As the sidereal clock (built in motor in telescope base that turns the scope at the speed the earth turns) runs on 110V, I'm out of luck.  Sure I have 100' of extension cord, but the coach is about 300 feet away.  I send Lucy a text asking her to bring it when she comes tomorrow.

The girls head back over to the coach and start cooking dinner as they are hungry, while I finish setting up the scope.  I head back and we eat fairly quickly without much ceremony.  Two teenage girls have BIG appetites and the three of us rail right through all the food (4 sliders each)!

Now it's nice and dark and I get the telescope dialed into the moon.  The girls are fascinated and take turns for close to half an hour, looking all around the waxing crescent at the craters, rills, etc.

Girls checking out some craters

 One of the cool things without the clock, is as you pump up the magnification, you can start to see the Earth's rotation as the moon appears to be moving through the view piece.  Of course this is relative motion as everything is moving, but on the highest power, it takes under a minute for a feature to 'wander' out of view.

After they got bored with the moon, I set my eyes on the next target:  The Orion Nebula.   Even though the moon was just shy of a quarter, it still put off plenty of light and made shadows on the ground.   We don't notice that in town with all the light pollution. 

I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I was able to get dialed in on the nebula.  Even though it's a naked eye spot, getting a moderately high powered telescope on an object takes a little bit of patience, especially when it's a 1975 scope with no electronics  other than the clock. (period correct for the motorhome! ).  Here are a couple of photos I did NOT take of the nebula.

About the color and size we could see with the moon so bright

The nebula has alot of color if you take a time exposure but the above pic is close to what the naked eye can see.  The moon was close in the sky and washing it out a bit so it was fainter than above, but you get the idea.  I do plan on getting to the point of taking photos with my scope in the future.

By about 8:30PM dew was starting to set up on the telescope case, so I packed it all up for the night.  The new dew shield worked great, but after the incident last year, I was quick to pack it away.  We got it all put away and heard from Beth and Lee that they would were on their way and should arrive in about an hour...  Well it turned into 2.5 and by the time they got there, I had burned ALOT of the firewood already and was sitting by myself as the girls were have a party in the coach.

 The next morning rolled around and we were up by 7:30 and off for a buggy ride.  It's your typical Florida swamp buggy that holds 7 people and the driver.  The park runs 4 trips on the weekend and it fills up pretty quick as I learned last month...  Anyway we got on the morning one, and Beth was able to hop on as we had one extra no show seat.  It's about 2.5 hours long and you go out where hardly any people get to in the park as it's miles from the campground.  Below are a couple shots from the back where I got to sit.  JT and I rode our bikes down this water filled path on a previous trip.

 

Military Trail across the prairie 

Back at the campsite, I noticed this Minne Winnie the evening before.  French Canadian couple who were real nice.  They liked the GMC and told me it looked big lol.  Well next to their 20ft I had to agree.  I think he said it was a 1984 or so. 

You can see the tripod with the wedge mounted on it next to the coach.  I wanted to learn more about it, but they packed up and left shortly later.

Closeup of the Winnebago, not much bigger than a van.

 Lucy arrived later in the afternoon and I had a conference call with my study group.  I'm working on my Master's degree and we had an online meeting.  While 2 bars of service is ok for sending texts, voice, and facebook updates, don't try to run video conferencing software over it.   It kept dropping me and finally I just gave up on it.

As twilight approached I broke out the telescope again and set it back up so the other adults would have a chance.  Was very interesting to see how much more of the moon's surface was illuminated vs. a day earlier.  The day/night horizon is nice to look at as you can see the shadows on the moon.  They of course were different than the day before, so the girls and I enjoyed that.  I was also able to dial in the nebula again, and a few other stars (all the other planets were below the horizon).

The rest of the evening was sitting around the campfire enjoying grilled shrimp and potatoes along with other delicious sides, and rum cocktails.

Sunday I had to get back to study so after pancake breakfast, packed it up and headed home....

Summer Camping in Florida

As we just got the coach back from being worked on, we were anxious to get out of town and enjoy it, as our last camping in it, was back in February.  

Having grown up a tent camper, the only places I ever camped in the summer in Florida was the keys or the Peace River, both of which had cool water and copious amounts of alcohol (in my younger glory days aka as my 20s lol).

I tried to conscript some of my friends, but none of them would have it in August and honestly, I can't blame them as I would AC and they wouldn't.  Now that, I seemed to get the timing issue resolved with the ignition (won't bore you with the details, but I was getting about 4 mpg), I wanted to stretch her legs a little.  Johnathan Dickenson State Park has been a go to spot of mine since the 1980s (above mentioned glory days) as it's only about 40 minutes away and used to be fairly remote despite it's closeness.  Town has grown around it, but once in the gates, it hasn't changed too much.

The preferred campground is the river loop, but it's been closed for months and will re-open in October.  As a last minute decision, I looked on Wed, and the Pine Grove campground still had about 30 or 40 spots open (roughly half full if even).  The Pine Grove is a bit of a misnomer these days, as it used to be a grove of Australian Pines that was thick and lush.  Unfortunately, they are also an invasive exotic species and after hurricane Wilma tore up the grove pretty good in 2006, the state removed all the exotic trees and as you can see it's pretty wide open space now...

I chose a spot near the bathroom/shower as the black water tank leaks, I'm lazy to walk so far, and campground was pretty empty..  This was the view walking back from the showers.

Check in was at 3, but we arrived around 2 and were able to get on the spot as it was vacant.  You can see my new 13x13 foot pop up tent.  It was the debut of the tent and it offers a nice amount of shade.  It does go higher, but I left it on the lower height setting.  It was about 93F out and not having working AC while driving, I arrived, plugged in, put up the tent and hooked up the water, and retreated into the AC to cool down.  Lucy wanted a nap as she hadn't slept well, so I busied myself setting up things and relaxing a bit.

We got the bikes unloaded and started out on a ride around 4PM.  Just down the road we found Mr. Gopher Tortoise who was quite animated and chased a rock dove around the scrub.  We had hoped to ride about a mile over to Hobe Mountain, but Mamma Nature had other plans.....

Not wanting to have my new pop up tent fly away like Mary Poppins, I decided we should peddle back and take it down (not to mention distant rumblings of the thunder gods).

While waiting for the rain to blow in, we amused ourselves with a ride around the campground and were impressed that there were at least 8 or 9 sites with tent campers on them!  The majority of the rest were 3 pop ups, 2 Air Streams,  and the rest were travel trailers, fifth wheels, or motorhomes.  As usual, we were the only GMC in sight.  Although there was a nice vintage 70s small trailer about 20 feet long (no one was around it though :( ).  We didn't have to wait long and shortly after the above photo was snapped, a bolt hit less than a second away, so in we went.

The repairs to the roof are resounding success as it POURED and we were dry as a bone inside.  We played cards and a board game until it let up about an hour or so later.  As we had taken just about everything out of the coach while it was away, alot of stuff hadn't got put back in.....like the gas grill.

The stove is still disconnected as the counter isn't completed yet either.  

So once the rain stopped, I was out there pretty quick lighting a fire so we could get some coals to cook our delicious shrimp over.

As you can see in the background it looked like more rain coming.

 Naya develops her remote control shrimp cooker as this one got peeled

We ended up cooking the potatoes in the microwave due to the weather (was going to wrap in foil and cook in the fire),  but despite the rain the dinner was very tasty.

After dinner fun was putting the top back on the pop up and watch the fire with a backdrop of lighting off in the distance.  Unfortunately, the wind direction had the smoke blowing straight at us (and into the AC of the coach we found out when we went back in lol).   We kept this up until it got dark and then the thrill of sitting in the rain tending a weak fire lost its thrill and we retired to the coach for the remainder of the evening.

As I went to bed pretty darn early, I was also up pretty early.  Daybreak to be exact!

 You can see how humid it is out at first light as the coach was about 75 degrees inside and the whole thing was wet with condensation.

She looks good in the golden morning light :)

I ended up taking a short walk around the campground looking for wildlife, then went back to bed for another hour and a half until others started to wake up.   After breakfast it was good and hot, so of course lets take a bike ride!

On our travels we saw another gopher tortoise who was even bigger than the one from yesterday.  This guy was in a hurry and made off pretty quickly into the scrub.

 Once up at Hobe Mountain (86 ft above sea level and the highest point south of Lake Okeechobee) it was all about the shade as by 10 AM it was over 90 already.  

 There was a nice breeze up here blowing in off the ocean, I didn't want to leave.

 It's amazing how clean the Intracoastal Waterway is up here, it's the same color as the ocean.

 Back down on the ground and in the sun, the girls take in the view of the park looking west.

On the left you can see Hobe Mountain and the lookout tower.  On the right you can see some of the ruins of Camp Murphy.  During the war, it was quite a complex here!

Lucy got her second driving lesson in the coach.  To date she has only driven it in this park. Got get her out on the road in it.

 Nice comparison with a SOB (some other brand).  Usually our coach looks little in comparison.

This guy is a Red Rat Snake that they took outside, but I missed the photo op (see our earlier posting with JD the snake in it).  He was pretty cool and quite a nice specimen.

After the nature center we took a dip in the river, and stopped by DQ on the way home for a snack.  We arrived home just in time to meet the afternoon rain (with lightning), so I didn't get a chance to wash her off yet...Until next time.