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.

Visiting Silver Springs! Also, first time at Southern Palms

Here begins the real struggle with booking RV parks...we visited Southern Palms RV Resort, a Thousand Trails resort, for the first time...however, I could only get 12 days here instead of our normal 14.  We've never tried Southern Palms because it is a considerable drive to get to Disney World compared to the other Thousand Trails parks, but since we no longer have our Disney passes, we figured we'd give it a try (it was also the only park in the general area available for any amount of time at all for this period!).  Turns out the staff are very friendly and the park is nicely maintained.  They even have a maintenance guy come with you to your spot to help you park...mostly because they cram you in like sardines (though not nearly as close as we were at Winter Garden...) and want to make sure you're parking at the right spot in the lot to maximize everyone's free space.

Parking at Southern Palms...we didn't yet have
a neighbor on the right side of the photo.

While at Southern Palms we started searching for land to buy.  I've mentioned that we're thinking all the campground crowding and the price of diesel are getting to us and we don't know that we'll continue this much longer...our desired solution is to find a plot of land to build a house and live in the RV on that land while we do so.  We spent a few days driving around central/northern Florida and southern Georgia looking for land.  We found a beautiful plot in Georgia with a pond...but the neighbor's house looked like a junkyard, so we decided we did not want to deal with that.  The search continues!

The highlight of our stay was a visit to Silver Springs State Park.  This was recommended to us by a neighbor back when we were staying at Rose Bay, and finally at Southern Palms we were close enough to make an easy day trip of it.  We took the extended glass bottom boat tour and loved it!  According to the website, the glass bottom boat was invented at Silver Springs in the 1870s.  We found out on our boat tour that Silver Springs used to be an amusement park, owned by ABC Studios in the 1950s-1970s.  They had exotic animals and other entertainment, and filmed portions of several movies and TV shows at that time.  The state took the park over in 2013, removed all of the entertainment except the glass bottom boats, and let everything basically go back to the nature you expect at a state park.  The current boats have been running since the 60s.  We saw four manatees, several alligators, and tons of fish, turtles, and birds.  All the seats in the boat were good seats to view the glass bottom.

The unusually ornate entrance to the park seems to date back
to its time as an amusement park

Sitting on the glass bottom boat

You may have to squint just right, but we floated right
over a sleeping manatee!  (Also 3 more I didn't snag a photo of)

A movie prop boat abandoned on the
river's bottom

Keeping an eye out for interesting stuff!

Can you see the alligator lying in the floating grass?  This seemed
to be a favorite pastime for them

These are three statues of gods originally placed for a movie
and later briefly featured in things like James Bond's 
Never Say Never Again

We highly recommend the glass bottom boat tour at Silver Springs!  We saw so many cool things through the glass bottom (including the numerous springs, which really didn't photograph well) and the surrounding nature was beautiful.