St Petersburg

We arrived in St Petersburg for another round of moochdocking at Dale’s place, until Friday. I promptly overdid it and got laid up by a bout of heat exhaustion and find myself in a bed in Dale’s pool house with Rusty sighing at my midnight restlessness while Layne sleeps aboard GANNET2 outside.

My mood is one of restlessness, because though I enjoy Florida I find myself back where we started a year ago. Layne is enjoying the familiar and remarks on how easy it is to manage a life on the road when we know where we are going. I want change and I feel goofy for being impatient. Change is coming in spades in a couple of months and you’d think I’d know by now how to enjoy the moment. 

After the National Forest stop we had a truck stop shower and in clean clothes presented ourselves for lunch with Nancy, a former resident of Big Pine Key at the grandiosely titled World Equestrian Center outside Ocala. 

We ate in the outside courtyard in perfect Fall temperatures and reminisced. I left them to it after a while and took Rusty for a walk under the giant live oaks festooned with Spanish moss. I couldn’t shake off the feeling of irritation hanging over me like a cloud. 

Layne is a patient listener and she sat me down and worked it out. We have to wait until January before we can leave the southeast for Arizona and ultimately Mexico. Thanksgiving has to be in Florida this year, we have doctor appointments in the Keys quite aside from friends to spend valuable time with. After that, instead of heading west we now have to plan end of year festivities in freezing North Carolina. 

It’s good to be around people we care about and I need an attitude adjustment. Knowing that makes me feel worse. I have had more exploration across the US this past summer than most people have had in a lifetime. Yet it’s not enough. I’ve seen places and talked to strangers in landmarks I’ve waited all my life to see. I evaded the horror of Hurricane Ian and the ghastly endless clean up. Dale, a great conversationalist has opened his doors to us and two fabulous spots to park await us in Key West. To say we are lucky grossly understates the case. Indeed we have done plenty already for one retirement. 

I think that cascade of good fortune pushes the pessimist in me to wonder when it will end. I fear the two month pause, I fear lose if kind Tim, I fear ease and comfort and don’t trust myself to keep pressing on.  What if…? Layne the practical as usual calms me down. Rusty treats me like the idiot I am by stretching out and enjoying the comforts of home while we have them. 

The future is there, waiting, but learning to live in the moment is as tough a lesson as ever. You’d think I have it figured out by now.  Silly me. 

After the pause this week we will have to remember to enjoy Florida once again and that’s not hard to do. 

Ocala National Forest

General gun hunting season starts November 5th this year and runs into sometime in February in Ocala National Forest. Normally I wouldn’t care one or the other but dispersed camping isn’t allowed during the shooting season, for reasons that are obvious I hope, so during some of the best weather for boondocking the national forests in Florida  are closed. 

Which was one reason we chose to spend a few days in the forest this past week. There are three national forests in Florida, in addition to Ocala there is Apalachicola and Osceola and all three have varied General Gun Seasons you need to check for each winter. 

By the time General Gun Season is over and cool weather dispersed camping resumes we expect to be swimming Mexico’s Pacific Coast. A different form of dispersed camping.

In addition to National Forests Florida’s water management districts offer low cost or free campgrounds and some dispersed camping, which may also have hunting season black outs but those we shall save for later when we travel north in December. This year we wanted to get at least some Florida boondocking under our belt and we succeeded in that. Five nights of utter serenity. 

I found a spot on iOverlander with no waterfront, no views and no features. Our spot was up a short dead end, perfectly level, surrounded by second growth pine tree monoculture and if no great scenic value at all. Perhaps that was its greatest value to us. We were well off the beaten path. Even on Saturday we saw only three vehicles pass by on the sand track a hundred yards away through the trees. The rest of the time we were alone in silence. 

We had internet access on Verizon and occasionally we could hear cars in the paved Highway 445 in the distance. But we felt alone. The sun was low on the horizon half hidden by the young pine trees so we did run through our batteries and we had eight gallons of water left in our 30 gallon tank while our trash bag was pretty full. But those were all just signs we had a very excellent stay. 

Rusty

Layne calls me a helicopter parent to Rusty. I suppose that must be partly true but as much as I fuss over his welfare I also like to see him run free. Or not…

Over the years in the Keys  I watched him vanish into the mangroves and leave me standing on the trail waiting for him to return. At first I worried he would get lost or injured and would disappear but pretty soon it became obvious to me he was more at home in the swamps than in suburbia. As much as he irritated me by refusing to come when I called I never stopped him running free and waited for him to come back to me at the side of the road. 

Then there was the time I couldn’t wait and according to a passerby he saw me drive off to an appointment without him. He ended up in jail and only next morning could a friend on his day off run over to the Marathon SPCA  and pick him up and bring him home for us. After that episode he never failed to come when I whistled so from that ghastly lemon we made lemonade. 

I never worried about him running off in Mexico. He was scared of the street dogs in a country where canines are not quite family members among the working classes. They get fed scraps to live, they hang on the streets like school yard toughs and when some middle class American dog walks through their neighborhood they gang up and try to see him off. 

The quiet streets of North America suit Rusty, the place where well fed  dogs spend  all day locked up and only come out wrapped in harnesses and bibs and all manner of restraints. He looks with scorn at the poor devils restrained in yards half mad from boredom and loneliness. Dogs are pack animals and Rusty knows his pack. We are his gang. 

When we arrive somewhere he sits outside and watches the world go by. I keep him leashed where I have to but he doesn’t need to be tied up. I even have a long tether for the rare occasions we use campgrounds where leashes are a requirement. Check out the Mexican campground in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán the only place in Mexico where the rules said we had to keep him tied up. Obviously  the tether stressed Rusty out completely: 

His home is GANNET2 and when he does get stressed or just wants to let go without worrying about being taken by surprise, he hops in and jumps up on his bed which travels on top of our bed. He sits up there and checks the world through the back windows. 

His other favorite spot is under the van. He’ll lay out in the sun for a while, then he’ll seek shade. Rusty isn’t a lap dog. He’s an American dingo and he lives like one. He survived being dumped in the Everglades so I know if we get desperate he knows how to keep us alive! For now we keep feeding him his treats. 

He learned to love to beaches in Mexico, a place where he couldn’t be ambushed. Seen here near La Ticla in the dangerous part of the coast of Michoacán…dangerous for turtles as we watched a cheerful man on a motorbike raid a nest. Rusty just played, no danger to anything. 

It was up in the mountains of Baja that I had one moment of worry for Rusty. I was enchanted by a condor circling over us only until it occurred to me that Rusty could be lunch. A quick swoop, a push over the edge and he would have been a fifty five pound meal on a cliff for the bird to pick over at its leisure. We spent a couple of nights at the vista point but I never expected it to live up to its name of “Condor Lookout.” Surprise, surprise. 

I try not to worry about him. Is he happy? Are we stressing him by driving him all over the place? 

A few months after we got him we took a planned trip to Canada. He was in his running free phase and we had a few scares when he disappeared but always came back. We spent a great time touring the  Ile d’Orleans and here is checking out the St Lawrence River:

I like to think he enjoys traveling as much as we do. Of course, if he doesn’t we are still going to keep rolling, so my fussing about him is to some degree empty self serving nonsense. Layne says he’s happy just to be with us. I agree. 

I try to imagine what a small abused abandoned dog thinks when he finds out the world includes temperate forests, cold winters and deserts so wide open he can run all day and not reach the end. 

He eats whatever kibbles we find along the way and much to our surprise his favorite treats are sticks we found in a Mexican supermarket. We call them licorice sticks they look so dark but they smell of meat. We’ve been rationing them out since we got back to the US to make our supply last. I don’t suppose he’ll miss them when we finally run out next week.

I am fond of saying you don’t get me without my dog and Rusty does his best to keep his side of the deal. Webb Chiles has never had a pet but he likes Rusty a lot. The best dog he’s ever known and Rusty is actually glad to see him. They are like old friends when we get together then he sits apart on his leash and watches us talk boats from his spot in the shade. 

They say the dogs you bond with most tightly are the hardest to train and the most resistant to domestication. Rusty fit the bill. I used to despair of myself, wondering if I was the right person for him he was so willful. Even now he sometimes refuses to walk or sits and stares at me until I give him what he wants. However he also knows when I really need obedience by my tone of voice and the balance is restored. 

We’re in the woods a few days, taking advantage of the cold front in North Florida and enjoying a wild camp before hunting season begins in a couple of weeks. Mornings are cold, 42  degrees, and when we let him out I wonder if he thinks back to all the places we have been where the cold set him free to be a dog. 

I hope he enjoys the journey as much as I do and the memories we make because without him the experience would be far less rich than it is, trying to see the world through his eyes. 

For some reason I don’t understand what breed of a dog you have fascinates people. Rusty is what I call a Miami Street Dog but a chance encounter with a stranger in Key West in 2016, the year we got Rusty, put me straight. 

https://bittersoutherner.com/carolina-dogs

Our vet’s best guess puts him at nine years old. His behavior makes me think he may well be a Carolina Dog. Who knows?

Dawdling

“Did you see five Asian males with guns threatening to shoot each other?” I should have preferred the police officer to have simply said welcome back to Florida after a year away. A year filled with color and life and fresh horizons. “No,” I said to her through a mouthful of potato chips, baked for good health, that I was sharing with Rusty, exhausted after a walk around the Publix parking lot. Our stroll was free of gunshots and other random violence but the police officer’s quest for evil doers was in line with expectations I suppose. “No one in Mexico ever asked us that,” Layne said when I told her what happened. She hadn’t seen any armed Asian men on her trek through the Jacksonville Publix. 

We stopped by Freedom VanGo briefly to report on the success of the upgrades they installed last year. They usually transform Sprinter four wheel drive vans into show pieces of custom off road art and our little workhorse home was a bit of a one off for them.  No one else has ever put a winch on a Promaster apparently. They were surprised we had actually used it twice to get us out of a jam. The tricked out Sprinters with huge bumpers and boxes, ladders and light bars towered over our dusty little road van, they pristine and sparkling with huge off road tires but also with no chance of being driven in dangerous Mexico. 

The fact is we aren’t going to be in Mexico probably before mid January. I am being required to mark time in the southeast until the end of the year to celebrate Layne’s sister’s wedding anniversary. My hope had been for a summer celebration outdoors under the sun but we will be required, by brother in law Bob’s desire, to freeze our backsides off under the shadow of Mount Mitchell a mid winter romp in Asheville, a city capable of producing snow and ice and damp short days in  lieu of beach days under Mexico’s winter sun. I am grumpy. I understand he wanted to celebrate the actual day of the nuptials fifty years ago, but his desire is holding up my travels! 

The weather gods did not cooperate when we stopped by to moochdock at Webbs place on the water. It was lovely and sunny and fresh in South Carolina but there was not a breath of wind. 

We did not take the original GANNET out for a day sail but we enjoyed sunsets and travel stories from the writer and circumnavigator and he reminded me Mexico will be there when we get there. 

I have Key West to look forward to while observing how Rusty reacts to his old haunts. We will see friends in a zig zag course across the sunshine state and arrive after Fantasy Fest for a few weeks moochdocking to catch up with friends.

Hanging out with Webb Chiles in the warmth of a southern autumn brought me home in a way. I have that end of vacation feeling as though I am about to slip back into routines, and the feeling makes me agitated. I’m retired and about to go away for a long time. I need to slow down and remember that which is old is new and even though it is all familiar, and welcome to some degree, I come home as a stranger. I am not who I was. 

“Traveling—it gives you a home in a thousand strange places, then leaves you a stranger in your own land.”   — Ibn Battuta