Central Florida

We took a 90 minute walk all round the neighborhood after Rusty woke up. It might have been a tad shorter had I not overridden my dog, convinced I knew the way back and took him off in the wrong direction. After I failed to recognized any landmarks I meekly followed Rusty back to the van. My wife claimed she was awake. 

Van life used to be glamorized before the pandemic forced a lot of youngsters to think twice bout van travel on YouTube but for us old foges used to the vicissitudes of boat life waking up in a van is no big deal. Tooth brushing is pretty much as normal. In the limited privacy of a residential back alley wipes make for adequate shower substitutes. We chose not to install hot running water and a full shower on the principle that time spent in the wilderness would be good enough for outdoor solar showers heated by the sun or by our kettle. Our struggle to keep the van simple for travel to less developed places is an ongoing project. And our ideas are not at all suitable for people who like to spend most of their RV life in parks and campgrounds with full facilities.

The area around Coffeepot Bayou is pretty upmarket and as a result not only is the landscaping impressive but the homes vary wildly in style and decor, and not all of them are palaces by any means. However there are some splendid alleys where I like to walk Rusty with my camera.

Another reason I really like St Pete: an abundance of dog interesting alleys! Dale is not an early riser so we took ourselves off after our morning ablutions and headed to that quintessential symbol of civilization in any American city: Trader Joe's. I sat in the van with Rusty while Layne got in a masked line to shop, which is a rarity for her these days but Trader Joe's takes the pandemic seriously, lines masks and dividers for all. The line actually did move very rapidly and everyone complied according to my wife.

Our plan such as it was included a bit of boondocking, that is to say sleeping in the woods of the national forests of central and northern Florida plus a quick visit to the Custom Coach Creations factory to have our induction stove top looked at. The fan was not turning off whether Herself cooked on it or not and though it heated up just fine something was definitely wrong as the fan never turned off. Custom Coach Creations replaced it with an improved model, and rebuilt the countertop in two hours and sent us cheerfully on our way under warranty and free of charge. Amazing service always from that place. Highly recommended.

As you can see the overnight spot was not the cleanest and though I left the piece of paper in the picture for effect I did not include the couch with mildew so thick it had grown leaves on the cushions and looked like watercress, nor did I photograph the skeleton of a deer, I think that was what it was, completely picked clean. The signs along the highway warning of bear activity got my wife looking at bear spray offers on Amazon. I laughed and got a glare in return. Rusty was cautious on the trail and crept along like a caricature of a hunting dog and in the end I was proved right. No one and nothing disturbed us, as unarmed as we were, and the night as black as pitch made the cabin all the more snug as we watched Netflix and listened to our exhausted dingo dog snore heavily from our bed. It was a quick overnight stop and free of charge with no neighbors and only the sounds of passing cars nearby on the highway for company. On our morning walk deeper into the forest I found a lovely glade that would have served us better but for a quick overnight this did the job just fine.

There are national forests in Florida suitable for boondocking but I'd rather we preserve the myth that the only places to camp in the wilderness are west of the Mississippi, though those places are a lot more picturesque than the pine scrub and sand of our modest and largely unknown National Forests in Florida and a few points further north.

Social Distancing On The Road

From the Ocala National Forest we took two days to get home making a  total of three nights on the road. Our idea was to see how we coped with various sleeping situations which are so different from what we knew on our sailboat. So after our wet experiences in the forest we got on the road and lumbered down sand roads to the pavement at sedate less than 30 miles per hour.  

The van cruises  at 70 mph on cruise control but fuel consumption dips to 15 mpg. I found that holding 60 mph I could see computer numbers (accuracy undetermined) hovering between 18 and 20 mpg. We had nowhere to be in a  hurry. Driving is easy enough but you need to anticipate your braking with a ten thousand pound van and equally after you have stopped for a traffic light you need to wait a while to wind up the acceleration again.   It will take off like an overloaded scalded cat but the point here is longevity not speed so babying the transmission seems the most sensible course of action. Stability control keeps the box upright and my wife loves the cubbyholes and storage pockets throughout the cab.

My wife had a plan to stop at Camping World in Ocala to check out Stuff, something we can't do in South Florida where Camping World has yet to establish a beachhead. However while we sat in the parking lot and I sweated to replace the electrical plug I broke driving off last week, my wife looked for masks going into the store and saw none. We decided to keep moving but as evidenced by the stuff for sale, we were back in civilization.

Rusty resigned his post as Chief Security Officer for a while choosing to plug in and drop out to recharge his batteries.

One has to resign oneself to the less than attractive spots and we took lunch followed by a copious nap in a rest area. Grilled cheese and tomato soup can apparently bring on the exhaustion of a fully lived life and the three of us passed out as comfortable as you please under the air conditioning in the middle of the parking lot. Rather weird but the price was right. 

In a time of coronavirus when you live with concerns about getting the disease this has to be the best way to get around and sales of RVs and campers are soaring for the time being. But I cannot see many of those purchases leading to a desire to spend days or weeks or -God forbid!- months in a small space such as we enjoyed. Sure, we had our doubts and discussed them but we went through all that doubt when first living on  a  boat and we knew what to expect this time. The space itself is much smaller than a 34 foot catamaran but the outside world is vast and easy to access, no dinghy required. I think for us to enjoy the interior space we need to have untrammeled exterior space.

For us there is not much value in paying to sleep in crowded campgrounds cheek-by-jowl with other refugees from reality. We both got the idea that for us travel without reservations, without fixed destinations, with pauses here and there to eat and sleep and hopefully one day to actually dine out like our civilized past, is how we want to travel. Van life stuck in one spot would be dreary, an invitation to rent a home temporarily, something we plan to do on the road. Equally for us if we have a small nimble home driving around pretending its a forty foot apartment that needs to be plugged in every night would be absurd. I see a way forward that we might very well enjoy but I readily accept that in an increasingly regimented world run on satellite time we may be veering off into the unpredictable world of nonconformity. With three weeks vacation starting next week these vague ideas will start to be put to the test.

Horse Country

Continuing our Tour Of Florida 2009 my wife and I left Ocala Monday morning heading west for Cedar Key. We took smaller county roads across Levy county through what is horse raising country: This is another of Florida's little surprises; a corner of the state that tries to look like Virginia. The countryside around Ocala is mostly low rolling hills covered with pine forests and where human beings have imposed themselves, classic post-and-rail fences to keep those pesky horses where the ranchers put them:
The roads continue to run straight and true, with occasional bends and lots of uninhabited open space. These parts of Florida are not the least bit tropical. This is the land of oak trees, Spanish Moss and sandy soils. In summer it gets up into the 90s but in winter it's not unusual to get frosts that mess up citrus groves and have people putting away their motorcycles and surviving by use of cars. Horrors! I find these landscapes quite enchanting even though some people argue that north Florida is more like Alabama or Georgia, this is still the Sunshine State:

This is definitely the Bible Belt and wherever two or three trailers are gathered in His Name, then someone will promptly put up a church:The other reason to hang out here is farming or ranching, so on either count I am not really a suitable candidate for life in this part of the world. I like looking at the broad open fields, and the trees dotting the horizon, but I am glad I have a home in the heathen Florida Keys:I don't know how or why horses got started here but they have been an economic mainstay for Ocala for long enough that the city has erected statues of multi colored horses all over the town as civic Art. There are tons of ranches out in the country and tons of them are for sale like this one:I've lived on dirt roads and personally if I never have to commute down a white gravel road again it will be too soon for me. Yes I know it looks nice what with those tall pine trees lining the road but dust gets everywhere including in your air filter and tires and suspension wear out. It's ruinous I tell you:The horses grazing placidly don't seem to mind that their farm is on the market:
I found the countryside west of Ocala to be prettier than that to the east which is odd because to the east lies the mass of the Ocala National Forest. However, seen from the broad expanse of the paved highway which drives through the middle of the forest, there isn't really much to see. Perhaps a Triumph Scrambler might be useful around there to explore the dirt roads and sandy trails. The country road driving east from Ocala is smooth and straight and easy:

As we continued west toward Highway 19 we came across this sign:

Not only had I never heard of it, I doubted very much it was named for the German poet. A quick Internet search revealed the truth; it was named for the man who sold the land to the State in 1992, a J T Goethe. It consists of 53,000 acres in two separate pieces and includes what the State calls 15 natural communities. We drove through this piece in less than ten minutes. Which is I suppose a lot of pine forest one way and another.

Oops! Wake up! Bend ahead!

And there is Highway 19 steaming north in a dead straight line, all four lanes of it towards the state capital, Tallahassee. We had to go up a short way then turn west once more for our next destination: Cedar Key, an island some people like to say looks as Key West did decades ago.

Ocala

My wife let me sleep a few hours after I got home Saturday morning and then it was off to the races. I slept in the car as we zipped through Starbucks in Key Largo, past Alabama Jack's at card Sound, and she only shook me awake to get some Mexican lunch in Homestead before we took off again to knock off 300 miles of Turnpike across the flat lands of Central Florida. We got to Ocala's historic district just as the sun was setting and while my wife and Nancy took off for some mainland shopping, Rosie and i took off to smell some bushes and trees and poles and things.The streets of Ocala's historic district are a pleasant place to walk a dog, with lots of Live Oak trees, dangling the Spanish Moss beloved of horror movies to give that macabre look to a neighborhood:The cold front hadn't reached North Florida by last night so the temperatures, it has to be said, were quite pleasant, hovering just below seventy degrees. I had on a sweatshirt as a precaution but I might have been able to get quite aways round the block without getting knocked down by the dreaded mainland night time frost. Rosie and I spent about an hour wandering hither and yon and just like Key west we saw some houses:Some in better shape than others:And we watched the sun set over the...no not the Straits of Florida, but the plains...of somewhere...Anyway I watched it get dark while Rosie ploughed a furrow through some bushes with her nose:Rosie showed no signs of flagging, not surprising as Nancy's idea of a foundling dog is a super energetic beagle, so we kept walking. And walking. And walking and to my profound relief she never did take a dump, as Nancy had promised me she wouldn't. I've quit picking up after dogs ever since Emma died, so Rosie was exemplary in that regard (I am a responsible dog walker even 400 miles from home). And as it got dark the houses lit up:

Deck the palms...even the stubby little ones. Especially the stubby little ones....

I love Florida, even the mainland isn't all bad. How bad is it that one has to decorate the house with fake blue icicles, to celebrate the solstice? This next one was for sale and I was curious. It looked like a reasonable ranch house type with probably three bedrooms and a garage built on. It advertised a pool and lots on interior upgrades but the details like square footage were left to the imagination. The asking price is $200,000 which I have to say, nice though it may be, isn't an in-your-eye bargain. It's nice to see not everywhere is for sale at any price!

Finally Rosie seemed done in so we headed home and found we were locked out. With all my experience dispatching I figured if some of the half its KWPD catches can figure out how to break and enter, I could do no less. Luckily for me Nancy, that paragon of home safety, had left the back door open so pretty soon Rosie was fed, watered, and hunkered:

I tried to play the role of the red blooded mainland male and fiddled with the remote control. Imagine that, me in charge of a television and then I found gold.

Local access TV was showing the Marion County 40th Annual Christmas Parade. That was a cultural eye opener too, a window on this community. Aside from tractor pulls and school parades there were endless business advertisements walking down the street, a ten horse mounted patrol unit (Lieutenant Newby eat your heart out!) with the Marion County Sheriff's office. Instead of the poofy Mazda Miata Club on display in Key West, Ocala had engines of a different order of magnitude:

There were lots of nativity scenes, and I may have missed them, but of transvestites I saw not one. Nor any gay bars represented or the Metropolitan Community Church. They had more tractors though:

It was quite the professional parade though rather lacking Key West's intimacy (and variety) I might add. Nancy has lived here for almost a decade but she hasn't forgotten her roots, her mangrove roots put down in the Keys in the 1970s:She is house proud of her historic home in Ocala, a home that cost a good deal less than it would have in Key West or on her favorite island Big Pine Key:We brought her a Conch Republic flag for Hanukkah.