Back at Southern Palms, ever so briefly

We finally hit my most painful reservation of the season - wherein I could find only 8 days at only one of the Orlando area Thousand Trails parks.  We managed to get back in at Southern Palms, and initially I could only get 6 days!  I kept on trying though and managed to inch the reservation up to 8 days with other peoples' cancellations.  Fortunately, we really enjoyed being at Southern Palms before - it's a great location for access to thrift shops, groceries, and land searching - so the fact this was the only park I could find ended up being good...but the fact we could only stay 8 days, not so good.  Aaron forgot to take a picture of our campsite this time, but we ended up staying in a different satellite campground (Pines section rather than Sun section, if you look at the map), right across from the laundry room, which I THOROUGHLY appreciated.

We stopped by our hopeful property-to-be on our way to my sister's place for our twin nephews' birthday celebration.  We wanted to mark out an approximate house location and approximate septic drain field sites for the health inspector, who was coming later in the day to do a percolation test before we close on the property (timing of that still to be determined...).

Our approximate house site.  We chose a spot at the top of the
hill with as few trees as possible - we want to keep as many 
trees on the property as we can.

Aaron felled our first tree!  This thing
was thoroughly rotten and fell over 
without substantial effort.

We met up with my parents at my sister's house right as they went to pick up the kids from the school bus.  We had a fun-filled family weekend celebrating the twins!

Aaron taking the twins to their karate class in the golf cart

Aaron made lightsaber handles from skewers, duct tape, and a 
permanent marker.  My sister will use them to serve fruit at 
the twins' party with friends the next weekend.

The big outing for their birthday was to the USS Orleck, newly arrived in Jacksonville.  They are still working on converting it to a full-blown museum, so we weren't able to explore the entire ship, but what we saw was cool and we really enjoyed listening to the two retired Navy docents working there.  One really unusual thing compared to other naval ships we've explored was that this ship was used by the Turkish navy for a while, so many of the words were in Turkish!

Approaching the USS Orleck

On deck with the missile battery

The logo/coat of arms for the ship
laid out in rubber flooring on deck

Finally, in an action we should be questionably proud of, we taught two of our nephews to play poker!  The older one had crazy beginner's luck and won most of the hands...not quite the lesson against gambling that we were hoping for!

Aaron teaching the kids poker.  No real money changed hands.

And in case you're wondering...the land passed the perc test!  Now we're just waiting on the title search before we can finalize the purchase.

Dogsitting at Trimble Park - Second Time

We spent a little over a week at Trimble Park, in the same campsite as the one we used last year when taking care of my sister's dog.  Technically you're not supposed to have more than a 35' RV in this park now (new regulation last year), but the trees still haven't grown in enough to prevent our 40' monstrosity from navigating the roads.  We weren't planning to stay in this park this season because of the new length restriction, but with the 60-day return limit on the individual Orange County Parks and the fact that half of them won't let you bring a dog...we had to risk it so we could take care of our dog nephew while my sister's family went to Disney World.

Campsite at Trimble Park - that's Lake Carlton in the background

As always at Trimble Park, the view from our campsite was gorgeous!

Beamer arrived a couple days after we did, dropped off as the family drove to Disney World.  Having stayed with us about a month ago, he settled right back into the routine we established over Christmas.

Happy puppy!

The big news for this stay is that we found a lot to make an offer on in Putnam County, Florida!  We made the offer the night before Beamer arrived and took him up to the land to try to do a survey (which did NOT work, as this land had not been surveyed before and did not have pins set...it's a 'metes and bounds' parcel, which means a real surveyor has to figure out the boundaries based on bearings from known locations...only subdivisions in Putnam County have proper plats recorded at the courthouse).

Looking at the property before we decided to make an offer

Picnic lunch at Riverfront Park on our way to try to survey 
the property

Cool wood carvings at Riverfront Park

We returned Beamer to his family near the end of our stay, meeting them at a branch of their boat club on nearby Lake Eustis.  The boat ride through the lakes and canals of central Florida was really neat, and quite different compared to the boat rides we've taken with them before on the intracoastal waterway.

With my sister's family on the canal leading to Lake Eustis

We had a campfire near the end of our stay at Trimble Park - always try to do at least one when we're in the public parks!

Sunset at the campfire

Time will tell how the land purchase process goes!