Back at Rose Bay...for the last time??

After Thanksgiving we headed back to Rose Bay RV Resort for a couple weeks.  Our original plan for the winter, which I've probably mentioned before, was to stay at the three Thousand Trails parks in the Daytona Beach area to be a bit closer to my sister, since we dropped our Disney Annual Passes and thus had no reason to be tied to the Orlando area.

Our campsite at Rose Bay

This time around our campsite was on mushy ground (due mostly to recent rainfall) and we only had 30amp power.  We were completely surprised that the RV park even HAD 30amp power (large RVs like ours and certainly all the permanent sites prefer 50amp power), but I couldn't remember if somehow I'd selected a 'value' site or something 2 months ago when I booked it, and we can survive on 30amp, so we didn't pursue it.  Last season one of our pads on our stabilizing jacks ripped off, and Aaron attached the remnant to the jack to keep it level this summer, but this was our first indication that it's really not the same...the affected jack, with a much smaller surface area, just kept on sinking farther and farther into the soft ground.  We ended up filling about a foot-deep hole with trash concrete we found at the edge of the RV park before the jack finally stopped sinking.  So we need to figure out a better solution to that...

Aaron decorated our RV for Christmas - I think he did a great job!

Ok this has nothing to do with Christmas
but while we were out at night this cute guy
was jumping on our car

Christmas lights!

We went to visit the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse during this stay.  It was a neat complex, with all the buildings well preserved/restored for both the lighthouse and the surrounding keepers' houses.  It is Florida's tallest lighthouse and still operates, though now it is in civilian hands.

At the entrance to the complex

Atop the lighthouse

While we were staying at Rose Bay, Aaron took advantage of living in Florida to book a VERY last minute cruise (two days' notice!!) on the Celebrity Silhouette - I'll make a separate post about that.  As we left on the cruise I attempted to book our next Thousand Trails stay...and hence the title.  For 3 stays now I've tried to book a Thousand Trails campground in the Daytona area with no success, and I've had increasing difficulty finding ANYTHING.  The first time, over Christmas, I didn't think much of it - it was a holiday, after all, and I was able to find a full two weeks in the Orlando area.  The second time also included a holiday weekend (MLK Jr day), so I thought maybe that was a problem, and I couldn't find anything in Orlando and had to call to have someone help me find a place outside Orlando for only 12 days (couldn't get 14).  This last attempt didn't include any holidays and I couldn't find any availability anywhere in the 10ish parks in the greater Orlando/Daytona area.  After several days of trying I found 7 days at the same outside Orlando park - I think someone must have cancelled a reservation.  This time the Thousand Trails phone line was so busy they weren't even allowing you to stay on hold for help.  So...things are looking very bad.  The true intense snowbird season is starting in January and with the hurricane closing a lot of parks on the west coast it seems that we're going to have a lot of trouble the rest of the season.  I'm a bit stressed!  We'll see what happens next time I need to book something...

We didn't take any pictures, but during the hurricane we experienced something odd with our RV where the engine lost power in surges and white smoke came out of the tailpipe.  Aaron read the code off our code reader that we purchased back in Texas and the first (and simplest/cheapest) solution was to replace the fuel filter, which he did during our stay.  Fingers crossed that this fixes the problem!

The last weekend we were parked at Rose Bay we headed up to Charlotte for our friends' Christmas party.  They hold this pretty much every year and it's always a good time!

Playing Catan at our friends' house the night before the party - 
for almost the first time ever, I won!

With my Bank of America friends at the Christmas party

Thanksgiving 2022

We struggled a bit finding somewhere to put the RV for Thanksgiving.  Since my sister and her kids were working/in school until Wednesday of the week, my original plan was to stay in Thousand Trails in the RV until Tuesday, then put the RV in storage and head to my sister's place.  However, in the first of what I was soon to find out was a long series of Thousand Trails booking difficulties, I couldn't find a place to park the RV into Thanksgiving week, so instead we decided to put the RV in storage on the Friday before Thanksgiving and spend over a week at my sister's (which all parties involved were excited about, so it ended up being a great thing!).  However, once we decided that, we could not find storage at any of the reasonably priced commercial storage locations in the area.  We finally thought to check the park where we'd be staying right before - Sunshine Holiday Daytona - and thankfully they had a mostly empty storage lot (most people who store with them are snowbirds who stay with them and store their RVs over the summer).  So come moving day all we had to do was pull the RV out of its camping spot and around the corner to the storage lot - nice!  Especially with gas prices these days!

We spent a fun week+ with my sister and her family, and my parents and aunt joined us after a few days.  We arrived in time to attend two of our nephews' belt promotion ceremony at their karate school, volunteer at a native American education event for the same two nephews, and attend a performance for our niece.

Belt promotion board kicking!

Belt promotion board kicking!

Aaron at his table with one of our nephews - 
the hostess introduced Aaron as an 'animal 
expert' with 'years of experience' ... which 
cracked us up as he only learned the names of the
animals associated with the pelts on his table
about 10 minutes earlier!

At our niece's performance, with my sister
and her husband and my parents

My sister and I went on a huge shopping trip for the week, determined that we weren't going back...all told I think we went back 9 more times that week 🤦... so much for that plan!

You'd think that would be enough groceries!

We made one big trip with everyone to Castillo de San Marcos, where two of the kids completed the Junior Ranger program.  It was fun!

Aaron with the boys inside the magazine-turned-dump at the fort

The kids with staff in uniform

Thanksgiving Day was so gorgeous we were able to have dinner out on my sister's lanai!  Short sleeves for everyone!

All in attendance at our Thanksgiving meal (including my 
sister's family, my parents, and my aunt)!

We stayed into the weekend after my parents and aunt left, and wrapped up the week with Christmas cookies, Christmas decorations, and a shark tooth hunting trip to nearby Mickler's Landing.  I found two shark teeth!  

With my sister's family at Mickler's Landing

The kids attempted to outweigh Aaron on the see-saw at one of 
the playgrounds in the neighborhood

We had a great week with family!  We picked up the RV from storage the Monday after Thanksgiving - it survived just fine in storage, and no signs of mice infestation this time!

First time Cruising with MSC: On the Meraviglia

Aaron found us a rather last minute 4-day cruise aboard the MSC Meraviglia that fit conveniently within our stay at Sunshine Holiday Daytona, allowing us to just leave the RV parked and hooked up to utilities for the few days we were away.  An escape to a tropical paradise was just what we needed after the dreariness and stress surrounding Hurricane Nicole.

This was our first time aboard an MSC ship of any kind.  We had planned to cruise with MSC during the European expedition we planned for 2020 (which COVID cancelled), so we had a bit of cruise credit with MSC that we needed to use up.  Turns out, with MSC, you have to use all of your cruise credit in one go - you can't use part of it and then use the rest later...and since we had originally booked a 2 week cruise and were now looking at a 4 day cruise...we had a lot of credit to use up!  The representative we spoke to eagerly helped us with this, booking us on the top level room category (the 'Aurea' experience - which included drinks, wifi, and access to an exclusive area on the ship, among other things) and adding all sorts of drinks and fruit baskets in our room.  So we were doing MSC in nearly the top way that we could - exciting!

Sure enough, when we entered our stateroom, our desk was COVERED with food and drink - from the two bottles of wine and two baskets of fruit the representative had ordered us, plus another set we assume was either due to Aaron's status (MSC allowed him to transfer his top-level status from his hotel status he acquired when he used to travel every week for work), the Aurea experience itself, or something else we booked that we didn't fully understand.  We received ANOTHER bottle of wine, a plate of cookies, and chocolates the next day.  We just took all the wine bottles off the ship for consumption over Thanksgiving - since we had the drinks package - but did try very hard to eat all the food we couldn't take off the ship (we made a sizeable dent but sadly didn't quite finish everything).

The spread greeting us when we entered our room

Enjoying the quiet and serenity of the exclusive Aurea area of the ship

We had mixed feelings about our first-ever purchase of a drinks package.  On the one hand we appreciated being able to pick up Coke Zeros at will around the ship and ordering beverages from the strolling attendants who were always eager to grab us drinks.  It was also really nice to have on the private island, where we went 'bar hopping' all around the island.  However, we felt like we needed to get our money's worth out of the package, which meant we drank more than we really wanted to (and still failed to drink enough to make it worth it), and since the package only covered drinks up to $9, we weren't able to get some of the more fun looking drinks that cost $10 or $11...if we hadn't had the package, we would have just paid for the fun drinks, but since we had it, we couldn't see paying extra for drinks on the ship!  So we're glad we finally experienced what the drinks package was like, but will definitely never do it again.

A few cool things on the ship itself...first, this was the only stateroom we've been in that had buttons INSIDE the room where you could set yourself in or away...I mean, the buttons were labeled differently, but they were there to tell your stateroom attendant where you were so he knew if he could make up your room.  I love it!  They triggered a set of lights above the door that indicated whether the room was clean or dirty, whether you'd chosen do not disturb, or whether you'd indicated you were out and ready for your room to be made up.

The main inside promenade area of the ship had a cool LED display on the ceiling - it reminded us of the light canopy on the Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas.  The ceiling alternated between different scenes throughout the day, and a few times a day would have a scheduled animated show (dinosaurs, famous ceilings, etc.).  It was unique and quite fun!  The main promenade shop also included a chocolate shop with some incredible chocolate sculptures.

Here the ceiling was showing the world
in cloud form

Aaron loves Moana so I had to get a 
photo of him with the chocolate sculpture 
of Maui from the film

The highlight of the cruise itinerary was a two-day stop at their private island, Ocean Cay.  This island has a neat history as MSC reclaimed it from industrial use and turned it into a natural paradise.  It is a TINY island and you can easily walk the whole thing in no time at all.  They have a nighttime light show on the lighthouse for ships that stay overnight (like ours).  It was all blissfully relaxing and beautiful.  This was the one time we really enjoyed having the drink package as we did kind of a 'bar crawl' to explore the various beautiful settings to sit and have a drink.  Our ship was only about half full, so we had as much privacy as we desired the whole time.  We did meet some like-minded passengers at one of the bars, who live in their RV as well but also try to cruise as much as possible! 

A view of one of the beaches

The lighthouse bar with a view of our ship

Aaron at the lighthouse bar

Light show on the lighthouse!  We watched from the beach.

Overall we had a great experience with MSC.  Being a European-based cruise line, it did have some quirks like a lack of flat sheet on the bed (Europeans only use duvets) and (bonus!) a distinct lack of tipping culture.  All the staff we encountered were helpful and friendly, the ship was fun, and we loved the private island.  We are curious though how we'll feel in the future with only the base level stateroom package...time will tell.

We survived the hurricane!

Wow it's been a while!  We've been going nonstop since my last post, with two cruises, Thanksgiving, and a Christmas party out of town...more on those later.  I just realized that my last post left us preparing for the hurricane, so it kind of looks like we didn't survive it...we did!

As I mentioned in the last post, we were fortunate to make it to our next park (Sunshine Holiday Daytona) and set up before the rain hit.  In retrospect we were quite fortunate that our Moss Park reservation had been cancelled, as it left us with just a 30 minute drive in the growing wind and rain instead of a 1.5 hour drive.  We were also fortunate that we moved on the day we did, as Sunshine Holiday Daytona was closing their office that afternoon and not reopening until the storm passed (meaning: if we had delayed moving just one day we wouldn't have been able to check in and would have been 'homeless').  Finally, as the hurricane approached, the park we HAD been at (Rose Bay) came under a mandatory evacuation order, so if we had still been there we would have had to evacuate with the RV in intense winds on the interstate or abandon the RV to the park (which did end up flooding) as we escaped in the car.  We're feeling very blessed that things worked out the way they did...all these things combined to give us a safe way to get to a safe place to sit out the hurricane.

The calm before the storm!

The hurricane itself was much less stressful than I anticipated.  We kept our slides pulled in (partially because the slide seals don't deal well with driving rain while the slides are out, but mostly to make sure the slide covers, including the one we just replaced, didn't catch and rip in the wind) and stayed put.  The bedroom slide is out in the photo because I was gathering clothes to set out for the next few days - our bedroom cabinets and drawers are difficult to impossible to open with the slide pulled in.  The RV did rock a little bit in the intense wind, but never to the point we were worried about tipping over, and the wind didn't pick up anything that could become a projectile (though several palm fronds did fall straight down).  We were parked right next to the community center in the RV park, which provided a bit of a wind break, so we considered that fortunate as well.

Here is my feeble attempt to capture the wind and rain as viewed from my nice warm dry sofa inside the RV.

Aaron took a couple of screenshots from his weather app to document our experience.

Right after the hurricane we left the RV at Sunshine Holiday Daytona (which was distinctly NOT sunny) and went on a cruise!  More on that in the next post.