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.