St Petersburg Nights

I woke up unexpectedly at 2:30 this morning and lay silently in bed hoping to fall back asleep. By 3:00 am Rusty had figured out I was awake and he started yawning loudly, his way of demanding attention. My fate was sealed.

As I fumbled in the dark for my socks and sneakers (my Crocs were locked in the van outside) my wife woke unto a ghastly charley horse in her leg, so I was absolved of any blame for waking her. Eat more bananas I said as I slipped out into the night. Trader Joe's sold us some nananas that appear to be going from green to dead with no intermediate edible stage so -joy - more shopping may be on the schedule. Retirement is one tough option after another busy day.

There wasn't a soul about on foot (I think), and only one car sped down the 22nd avenue corridor to some improbable destination. Rusty walked ahead as though he owned the neighborhood, which he did for a half hour.

I was busy putting this well lit, Halloween-free, home into black surroundings until I noticed, below my viewfinder, my dog in the all too familiar posture. Dale had a large beef bone the night before for dinner on some semblance of the Atkins diet and I feared all Rusty's gnawing on the ample leftovers might produce a rather more wet egg than I like to pick up. I swept through and removed all trace of something quite easy to pick up. There is no chance this neighborhood is going to get up in arms about rowdy van dwellers ruining the local charm. Such are the worries of a well bred nomad.

Later in the morning you will see enthusiastic drivers of expensive cars rushing off to pay their bills after jogging and dog walking and cycling to get fit for a day of savage officery. I can hardly believe my luck that I've put it all behind me.

Lost glasses anyone?

Dale bought his escape pod after we oversold the joy our box on wheels brought us. He had Custom Coach build him a 19 footer and he's driven it to New England and back to see his son in college, and his son drove it back which was an act of faith only a father would have. Dale sees his van as a hurricane evacuation tool as well a vacation device and now my wife has been through it, it is ready to go. Not as soon as ours.

Had the powerful cold front from Up North not swept across us last night I might have been tempted to go for a dip. However it was cool enough and quite windy enough for me not to have oozed one drop of sweat since the winds came upon us, so clearly the fresh water pool at 3:30am was out of the question. 

Rusty curled up next to me and watched while I did the crossword and read about an Italian monk who noted down the presence of Markland in some notes he wrote. As it was in the 14th century 150 years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and because his notes were only just discovered, the academic world is in ferment, as it should be. The next thing we'll discover is Columbus knew perfectly well how to find degrees of longitude at sea. Probably not.

The mind tends to wander a bit at that hour. I was getting sleepy but being unwilling to disturb my dog I sat on waiting for some signs of life from the curled up dog.  

Eventually he sat up and I went back to bed. 

He will be glad to know there's not much driving today, two hours to dinner with a friend in Ocala then we have our eyes on a rest area just inside Georgia two hours beyond dinner. Tomorrow Hilton Head is the goal and like the three Kings we will bear a gift, a bottle of liquid gold, for  Hilton Head is home, oddly enough, to Ulysses' younger brother home from the seas and the key to the kingdom is called Laphroaig.

Moochdocking In St Pete

There are different ways to park your camper for the night, you may be surprised to learn. The proper and sensible way is to find a campground, make a reservation and hand over a sum of money usually between say $30 and $60 for one night. You get to plug in your power cord, a water hose and most likely a cable TV cord into your camper parked on a neat pad equipped with a picnic table and neighbors equally equipped sitting right alongside you. We try to avoid this sort of camping. Paying to sleep in a crowd seems a bit daft. It can be useful if we need to stop for a few days and need lots of electricity to run the air conditioning for several nights in a row.

There are paying camping spots that are quite appealing and you find those courtesy of the government in parks of various sorts, not excluding national forests. Formal organized national parks are fabulous and we have the seniors parks pass which is all to the good. The downside is they don't like Rusty. Essentially a dog can only go where vehicles go in National Parks, and you can see why. Inconsiderate owners, people who don't pick up after or control their dogs spoil the situation for the rest of us as usual so I'm not going to run down the national parks service for their policy but it does mean we can't do much more than drive through National Parks. Bummer. 

State and National Parks, and I'm generalizing, tend to offer cheaper and more rustic sites which need to be reserved usually. Some have plug-ins others offer only a picnic table and communal loo of the basic pit toilet type, but they generally have bigger spots with more trees and less emphasis on packing the site with as many paying customers as possible. Florida has some excellent state parks, well worth visiting. Water management districts in Florida have some great camping possibilities too. Even the Army Corps of Engineers offers places to park for the night.

Then you get to dispersed or wild camping, also known as boondocking which is usually found in Bureau of Land Management Lands, mostly in the west and National Forest lands scattered all over the place. Rules vary and the most popular spots are being trampled to death of course, but in these places you park for free for up to 14 days before you have to move (at least 25 miles) and you are supposed to leave no trace and not expect any facilities at all. Find your spot within the local rules and set up camp undisturbed. More our speed.

Then there are approved parking lots where you can stay, with an understanding that you will buy some stuff perhaps. We do Harvest Hosts and have visited wineries breweries distilleries farms and so forth that allow you to park, offer no facilities expect no payment and allow but one night. Other places include the parking lots at Walmart and Cracker Barrel. These places have been disturbed lately by overnighters being rowdy, pulling out chairs and tables and leaving trash. These socially stupid moves have shut down many Walmart lots for casual overnight camping. We haven't yet bothered with these types of store parking lot stops.

Freeway and roadside rest areas are our preferred quick stops. Some people are fearful of the evil that lurks within but Eileen Wuornos has long since been executed and we find rest stops to be quick easy and reliable. We park in the car lots to avoid the comings and goings and overnight rumblings of 18 wheelers.

Finally there is wild camping, stealth parking or street docking. We do this when all else fails or if there is a nearby attraction or if we are tired and need to stop. Arrive late, leave early, is our mantra and we typically stop between 11pm and 5 am. We are discreet, leave no trace and don't even walk Rusty.  We first stop nearby and I walk Rusty and we prepare for bed. Then we drive till we find our spot, go straight to bed and I get up at five and move the van at least a few blocks before I walk Rusty.

In St Petersburg we have stopped to see Dale, Layne's college friend and he has a spot for us to park the van, so you could call this moochdocking, which is one way of describing parking your van in a friend's driveway. He actually has a pool house so we are living in his home essentially and the van is parked in his alleyway. Sort of moochdocking.

When we do visit friends we prefer to stop half a day away at a truck stop (another noisy location for free overnight parking) where we buy showers for $15 to $25 (for both of us), do laundry if we need to and freshen the van up. Then we arrive at our friend's place not demanding to use their facilities as if we really were mooching. Sometimes we spend a night at a hotel, usually on credit card points and complete our ablutions there before showing up fresh as daisies at our friends' place. I find it rather objectionable to appear and immediately demand to use the facilities as though we are seeking a freebie.

So having settled in for a few days I have been walking Rusty, Layne the former lawyer has been transferring the title of the Fiat 500 to Dale who went for a drive and came home grinning ear to ear. He even got a second glance from a passing blonde totty he said, suddenly feeling full of himself and dropping the years with all his middle aged cares. I never thought of my commute car as a tool of seduction but there we are.

I like Dale's upper class neighborhood with lots of sidewalks and alleys and varied architecture so I like to photograph this area around 22nd Avenue as we walk.

Romantic seating tête à tête with security fencing:

I see faces:

Rusty is adapting to houselessness. He is feeling his way as he always does, so even though he is now an old hand at van travel and will sleep in his bed on our bed underway, he has suddenly developed a certain nervousness when away from the van and the familiar. I encourage him to walk as normal but we are confident that after a while he will learn to trust the process and enjoy the road with us. After five years together we have come to learn his patterns, Layne learns his ways faster than I do. This time I'm not worrying about him adapting.

He looked pretty relaxed in the sun while we cleaned up and sorted out Dale's van for him with some ideas we have learned to improve our home on wheels. Dale's van is his tool to visit his sons at college and to see his friends along the east coast so he is a mooch docker par excellence you might say. Over grilled salmon last night he introduced me to Anna Akhmatova a Soviet refusenik poet. Luckily there is Kindle or the van would be sunk as we pick up bits and pieces as we mooch our way along.

Swimming With Leaves

I am the navigator. I'm not in the league of Ferdinand Magellan of Vasco da Gama but I do pride myself on enjoying mapping and studying places to visit and backroads and so forth so I decide the route. That is a blue job aboard Gannet 2. I wash up, I navigate ...

I proposed a backroad drive to St Petersburg from our I-75 overnight stop and the admiral agreed so I led off in the van and she followed in (Dale's) Fiat 500. My first target was a Mexican store south of LaBelle, a place known to us where we got an early lunch, barbecued ribs rice beans a giant hot pepper and grilled onions with more corn tortillas than you can eat. Oh yes, I thought, I remember why we are going to Mexico. I took Rusty for a walk and if you have watched the Walking Dead, a series that held my interest for a while, you will know why I found the tin fence so fascinating. It didn't look "walker" proof to me.

Florida back roads are long and straight and boring except when they aren't. If you only know the state from I-95, The Turnpike or I-75 you really don't know Florida at all. This is cowboy country, fields dotted with huge spreading oaks, clumps of cows lounging in the shade, orange groves and small towns lived in by proper Southerners. You may have heard the joke about the further south you go in Florida the further north you arrive. My neighbors on Cudjoe were from Connecticut...

Orange crates piled high on a trailer. Orange season is when you want to be traveling as you can smell orange cakes being baked at the various processing plants...it just smells like that to my sweet obsessed mind. The prance stands open and you should stop and buy the sort of Florida orange juice your grandparents stopped for when they took winter breaks. Or you can stick to I-95.

Rusty cares not one jot for any of this, so while Layne was exercising her Mexican Spanish ordering lunch he took me on the scenic route behind the Azteca market.

We took our lunches back to the air conditioned van where Rusty was lying in State. 

Then we collapsed into a carb coma. ice you have traveled with a motorhome, be it ever so small going back to a car without a bed or a toilet or a comfortable place to sit becomes a hardship. Layne asked me if I had any twinges when we passed motorcyclists droning the long straight road and I could say without doubt, none whatsoever. I do think I'd like to settle some where rideable if I am still active after this journey. I'd like to ride back roads to lunch or perhaps to a friends place but I think motorcycle touring has been superseded in my life by the comfort of parking and sleeping wherever I want.

Layne took her Fiat (now Dale's Fiat) by the direct route while I meandered across Florida, driving roads familiar to me as we have explored the state in all directions, but lovely nonetheless. Finally I had to get on I-75 to cross the Sunshine Skyway bridge to St Pete. Layne called and said she was off to Trader Joe's to buy more coffee to replace the stuff I accidentally threw out in my frenzy of stuff anti-gravity and I got to stop and sit. After I walked Rusty.

There is a bike path from St Petersburg and happily we walked the trail before the afterwork crowd slipped into their spandex and rode with concentrated ferocity down the trail. And then up the trail as my walked dog and I sat and did some more thinking.

There were no No Overnight Parking signs here as it is a basic rest stop and scenic area. Actually I have slept at the main rest stops either side of the bridge but this little pullout was a new find, all to ourselves.

Inevitably I got the call and had to move on.

There was a northwest breeze produced by the tiny cold front that reached this far south so I pulled out my Pico chair and sat in the shade with the breeze and caught up with my correspondence.

Rusty at home.

I didn't say it wasn't hot work walking in the blazing sun, I just said the breeze was nice and cool...

Rusty was ready to sit and think as he so often does. We sat and thought in companionable silence watching the occasional mad cyclist steaming by, and I could have sat till dinner time followed by bed followed by a night of uninterrupted repose. However...

We got to Dale's where he grilled grouper and we asked about the pool in front of the pool house where we are staying. He said its got a few leaves in it that fell from the tree. He sounded dubious about the whole thing. We said we swam all the time in the canal behind our house. No one else on our canal did. One neighbor wittered on about alligators as though having missed their chance for the past six years they were about to invade the canal and drown us for dinner. Another neighbor went on about barracuda as though we were swimming with deadly missiles but I got used to barracuda swimming alongside when we were snorkeling in the Bahamas years ago. I never saw any in the canal and I suspect their reputation comes from James Bond movies not real life, as usual. The waters looked green and unappetizing on windy days and the implication was there might be bubonic plague in the canal, but despite all those holy terrors we swam every opportunity we got and were none the worse for it.

There really weren't very many leaves in the pool and we enjoyed the cool refreshing waters a great deal. Obsessive me swept up the easy to catch leaves but swimming back and forth with not an alligator in sight was very relaxing.

Dale is a good man, smart, funny to talk to, eccentric and wide awake to the ways of the world. He made his life in technology and now he's retired he sits and thinks and he doesn't even need a van to do it.

A few leaves in, a swimming pool, a long silent alley to walk Rusty along, pretty homes, big oak trees and no deadline to go home and start work. I think Layne and I have stumbled on something good here. For now.