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

Rose Bay and Two Hurricanes!

We had decided earlier in the year that we would spend the winter bouncing between the three Thousand Trails parks in the Daytona Beach region; we usually spend the winter in Orlando, but since we dropped our annual passes to Disney World this year (considering the insane crowding and the various changes that have destroyed spontaneity in the park), we thought we'd try another area out.  We've been to two of the three parks in prior years, but this is the first time we stayed at Rose Bay.  

Our site at Rose Bay RV Resort

The Rose Bay resort sites were quite spacious by RV park standards, both wide and deep, and the park had the added perk of having the head of Rose Bay located in it, where we hear you can sometimes see manatees (something to look for when we return later in the season!).  Also the laundry is only $1.50 to wash/$1.50 to dry - one of the cheapest prices I've ever seen!  The ladies in the front office were friendly and helpful and our neighbors were friendly and quiet.  There were two downsides to the resort...first, it is located a little bit of a drive off the highway, which meant Aaron had to drive through a lot of stop and go traffic going through stoplights, which stresses him out.  Second, it was LITERALLY right on a train track, and the trains came through sounding their horns at all hours of the day and night, frequently shaking the RV.

The railroad was SO CLOSE

The first weekend we were parked here we drove up to my sister's new house in St. Augustine to go with them to the Jacksonville Naval Air Station's air show.  The highlight of this was getting to see the absolutely amazing Blue Angels!!  We had not seen them in person before, and their portion of the show was absolutely breathtaking.  The rest of the show was impressive as well, but nothing could compare to the Blue Angels.

With my sister's family standing in front of the Blue Angels' 
airplanes parked on the runway.  The ladies and the kids are
sporting USA sunglasses we picked up at a bank's tent.

The classic diamond formation for the Blue Angels.  Major 
kudos to Aaron for getting this amazing action shot!

We spent a quiet week not doing too much at Rose Bay and returned to my sister's house the following weekend for Aaron's birthday.  We went to an absolutely insane trunk-or-treat for their neighborhood, where people went all out decorating their trunks and had huge amounts of candy for the kids and alcohol for the adults!  

My sister and I got Aaron an Established Title to 5 square feet
of land in Scotland, which gives him the right to be called 'Lord 
Aaron'...make sure to remember that when you talk to him next!

Dressed up for Halloween with his
birthday cake

At the trunk-or-treat with my sister's family

My sister loved having Aaron there for the weekend because
it meant she had help carving the 'kids' pumpkins ('kids' in 
quotes because the kids tell her what they want on the 
pumpkin and then vanish while she does all the work).  Aaron
did the Pokémon ball and the scary pumpkin on the right.

After that things got interesting...well, we found out a little earlier, but this is when our plans changed.  We were supposed to leave after two weeks in our standard Thousand Trails-County Park rotation, but about a week and a half before our county park reservation we got a call from Orange County to tell us that the one park we happened to pick for our first stay of the season was still closed due to damage and flooding from Hurrican Ian.  While we were at Rose Bay we saw some damaged signs and huge piles of brush collected after the storm, but mostly everything seemed fine, so we hadn't expected any trouble in our RV stays.  So much for that idea!  So with 1.5 weeks to go we had to suddenly find an alternate location ... over a weekend ... in the winter season ... in Florida.  We were a bit panicked as all of our standard campground choices were full.  But we finally thought to ask at Rose Bay, and the helpful ladies at the front desk were able to work things out so that we stayed at our current site at a 20% Thousand Trails discount off their weekly rate, which brought the cost down within the range we were comfortable paying.  Phew! 

In our final week at Rose Bay we did a little more exploring of the immediate area.  Sadly we're not really beach people, so even though we were staying near Daytona Beach we didn't actually go to the beach.  Instead we explored nearby Spruce Creek Park, which had a nice little walking trail, and went to a local ice cream shop (Neighbors Ice Cream Parlor) where they made their own absolutely delicious ice cream. 

Hiking at Spruce Creek Park

Ice cream at Neighbors Ice Cream parlor
- don't worry they're not both Aaron's,
I had the waffle cone!

So the title promised two hurricanes...just our luck, our time at Rose Bay ended with the approach of soon to be Hurricane Nicole.  We took a look at the forecast for our travel day, where the winds started out the morning around 10mph or so but steadily increased to over 20mph during the time we should have been traveling to our next park, according to their check in time.  Torrential rain was promised starting around noon as well.  As a result, we rushed to get off the site early and got to our next park an hour before check OUT (two hours before check in).  With our early travel we avoided the worst of the winds (very important when driving a massive windcatcher like a 40ft RV!) and most of the rain, and were able to both tear down and set up without being rained on.  I'll tell you how we end up weathering the hurricane in the next post!