Monday, May 4, 2020

Last post from Florida, finally

We have made up our minds to move.  Jan had made a hair appointment for Tuesday, so we planned to leave Wednesday.  Well, on the 1st of May the governor decided not to include hair salons in his slow opening of Florida, so we looked at each other and said, okay, we'll leave Monday instead.  On Friday, we moved a lot more of our stuff, the grill, a bunch of chairs and tables down to our storage unit in anticipation.  Then Saturday morning when Tom and Karen were in the process of leaving, we looked at each other and asked why are we waiting until Monday?  So Saturday we moved our rugs, patio mats, and almost everything else to storage, leaving just the satellite dish for Sunday morning.

We were off Sunday morning.  We have been blessed with very nice weather these last few days, lower humidity, a nice breeze, almost cool in the evenings.  So we will make our way north to the Atlanta area where we will sit about a month while we watch and see how things play out with this virus.  

But before we left we saw a very cool thing.  We have a gopher tortoise preserve in our park, and on most warm days you can see between 1-7 tortoises.  Occasionally they make their way through the park and may come walking through your campsite.  But the day before we left we saw something we had never seen before, a momma laying eggs.
Life goes on, virus or not
I made good use of some of our down time and tied some more flies, we are starting this season with WAY more flies than we ever had before:-)
Clockwise from the front left, scuds, Shiney Hiney caddis pupa, San Juan worms,
and stimulators
Then, of course, since we were getting ready to leave by washing the motorhome one last time, I pull in the front driver side slide and, BANG!  What?  Turns out one of the slide locks that we replaced last year for $1800 broke.  So I had to pull it off, open it up and found the wire that operates the lock had broken off.
This is the pivot that engages the lock when you bring in the slide

You can see the wire that separated
I called the place where we bought it to see if the manufacturer had any warranty, and after sending in a bunch of pictures, they are looking into it.  We're keeping our fingers crossed.  In the meantime I put the now inoperable slide lock back on, we still have the front one, and we are pressing on.

So since we were leaving early we decided to go to Port St Joe, FL to Presnell's RV Park right on the water for one night.  It was so nice to be moving again even with all the uncertainty, and then the love bugs arrived.
Pretty bad
Even worse
We were hoping we'd miss them, but no......  By the time we pulled in, I could hardly see.

But it was worth it.  We got a nice waterfront site.  The campground is busy and full, families having a great time uncooped, but maintaining distance.  It was a nice relaxing evening.
Happy Hour, of course

Capped off with an excellent sunset!!
We had set up an appointment in Oregon to have some paint repair done in mid June, but on the way here we heard their governor just extended their lock down until July 6th!  We have no idea what we will do or whether it might get shortened or what.  We'll keep you posted as we learn more and more.  But for now we are headed to the Atlanta area for a month, and then?????

2 comments:

Sandy said...

I'd find another paint shop. WA, OR and Cali will probably not open until fall and then they will claim a second wave of virus and close up again. OR plates flooded into Idaho this weekend.

Bill said...

Yes, we are afraid of that. Beginning to work on yet another contingency plan:-)