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