Family time and Cruising

As I mentioned earlier, we have left the Orlando area!  Our first stop on our trek north was a two week stint at Sunshine Holiday Daytona, a Thousand Trails resort where we stayed in the fall to be close to my sister while we helped with the kids.  As with the last time we were here, we parked in the rear of the park with all the full-time residents.  I have mixed feelings on this resort, as the parking situation is not great - again it was difficult to navigate around the permanent residents' lawns that held vehicles, lawn decorations, and outright anti-RV posts to the edge of the lots.  However, the staff here are quite friendly and accommodating, they have the cheapest laundry I've seen since we started RVing, and *most* of the residents are very friendly.  I say *most*...for the first time basically ever since we started all this, we encountered a hostile neighbor.  We're thinking he was grumpy because he was going through a divorce - when we arrived, there were two kayaks and two bikes at the site, but by the time we left there was only one of each, and in the couple days we were there before we moved we only saw one man.  We promptly asked the office to be moved and they were able to accommodate us a day later, relocating us between two friendly new neighbors.  Somehow in all of this we didn't manage to take a picture of either site, so instead of our typical campsite photo here I'll show you a picture of poor Beamer, who we still had for the first day we were there, wondering why his house shrunk and why it was moving!!

Stressed out pup!

We chose this campground due to its proximity to my sister, and we went over to her place both weekends.  We enjoyed playing games, eating good food, and trading cruise stories.

Playing Carcassonne

Playing the card version of Pictionary - a rare event when my
brother-in-law and our eldest nephew actually joined the game!

As anyone who knows Aaron would guess, he constantly has his eye on cruises and discounts on cruises.  As luck would have it, Carnival cruise line was running a spring/50th anniversary sale when we arrived at Daytona.  Aaron found a great deal on a cruise that ran during the week, leaving us our weekends free to spend time with my sister.  It was going to two islands we hadn't visited before on a ship we hadn't been on - perfect!  So with a few days' notice we booked the cruise and headed down to Port Canaveral to board the Carnival Elation.  We cruised in our first-ever inside cabin...I have mixed feelings, on the one hand it was a LOT cheaper and had basically the same space as the outside cabins on the ship, but on the other hand not having any natural light actually made it harder for me to sleep, and the lack of natural ventilation made it a little musty (though that might have been the age of the ship - 20+ years old).  The ship, being old, was much smaller than they build cruise ships nowadays, had basically no specialty dining, and had quite small entertainment lounges.  We had trouble finding seats at the evening theater productions and at the comedy shows.  On the flip side, the entertainers were very talented, and the ship had more character than the more modern ones did, with artistic architectural and decorative touches everywhere.  The one hiccup in this cruise was that someone had a medical emergency on route to our first port (which should have been Grand Turk) - right at the beginning of a sea day - so we had to divert to Nassau, which became our first port instead (we skipped Grand Turk and headed to the Dominican Republic on schedule).  As far as we know the person recovered well after getting to Nassau.  Here are the highlights of the cruise!

A dolphin swam around the port area before we departed!

Our daily breakfast spot at the buffet restaurant

One of the best things you can expect on a Carnival cruise
is a towel animal zoo!

A first for us - this ship offered tea time
on sea days, which consisted of tea,
sandwiches, and light desserts - yum!

A nighttime view of "Tiffany's" buffet - I loved all the stained
glass peacocks!  Hopefully you can kind of see what I mean
about the artistry of the ship

An outside view of the ship from the port at Amber Cove

The view atop Loma Isabel de Torres - amazing!

The Christ the Redeemer statue atop 
Loma Isabel de Torres

A heart shaped photo opportunity in the park
surrounding the peak

A young man was driving these cattle in the middle of the road!

We had a few days after we returned to visit my sister again and do laundry before beginning our trek north through public parks (read: no sewer in my future!).  We also discovered we were down to just 18% left on our propane tanks - a problem since I use propane for cooking all the time!  Unlike the last time we rushed to fill the tank when we misread the gauge, this time we were legitimately low on gas, so we needed to fill up.  Finding a place to fill the tank permanently attached to our RV has always been a challenge, but much to my delight I discovered this time that truck stops can sometimes provide propane!  A Flying J on our route on 95 offered reasonably priced propane, so we didn't even have to divert from our travel plans.

Aaron likes to see what's going on and 
ask the guys about what they're doing
when we get the tank filled

With that we were headed to our last stop in Florida on the way north.