Family Camping at Magnolia Park...Our last real camping trip?

Due to the short stay at Southern Palms, we enjoyed a nearly two week stay at Magnolia Park!  This was kind of a nice ending to our nomad lifestyle - a long stay in a public park, our favorite, peaceful, kind of camping.  Our next sites will be month+ long stays at proper RV parks where we're properly paying a monthly rate, with the ultimate goal of moving the RV onto our potential property as soon as we have water and sewer hooked up.  But more on that later.  

Our campsite at Magnolia Park - right on the path to the bathroom!

The kids appreciated the easy access to the bathroom.  We had lots of fun cooking out, playing games, playing catch, driving on the Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive, and searching for roosting peacocks at night!

Playing Telestrations around the campfire

With my sister and nephews in front of the first large alligator
we found on the wildlife drive

This alligator was so close!

If you zoom in you might be able to see that there was an
alligator's nest at the far side of the water.  The kids wanted to 
come out to see but my sister insisted on having them hold hands
constantly so they wouldn't fall in near alligator mom.

Aaron got his old chainsaw up and running while we were at the campground - a feat that required lots of cleaning and a couple small replacement parts.  We'll need the chainsaw for land clearing once we actually own some land!  My parents brought Aaron a bunch of his tools from the farm in West Virginia - a small enough set to fit in the RV basement but large enough to put together a shed so we can go get a larger load and have room to store the tools.

Aaron with his working chainsaw

We enjoyed our last peaceful nights at Magnolia Park reflecting on our nomad RV journey and making sure to enjoy some good campfires!  Aaron and I have some conflicting views on our future in camping - while we still have an RV, I'd like to run out to a public park every couple months or so, but Aaron is completely focused on building a house (once we can!) and stopping driving the RV so we can drop the expensive RV insurance...we'll see how things end up working out!  We've decided we enjoyed our 3.5 years on the road, seeing the sites and meeting neat people.  We are both disappointed that crowding and costs made it impractical for us to really get out and explore the country the way we thought we would...of course everyone has different tolerances for these things, we know plenty of people are going out and exploring despite these issues, but it didn't work out for us.  We also hated the thought of being away from family for a year or more that would have been required for a real round the country trip.  But we enjoyed the adventures we did take, the big Texas trip being a highlight, and also just being exposed to this whole other aspect of living that we hadn't understood before.

Our last campfire

This peacock had no fear walking near
running cars

The peacocks finally put on a display as we were leaving!  With
the peahens gone, they did not display very often.  As far as I 
could tell, these two were trying to intimidate a squirrel.

So what's the future of this blog?  I think I'll keep it going as long as we have the RV.  Hopefully we will get out camping a few more times before we sell it, and if we can ever close on this property we'll have some building adventures to share while we're living in the RV on the land.

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!

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.

Nephew time at Kelly Park!

Our second Orange County Park of the season was Kelly Park...I think this one might really be my favorite.  It has the absolutely beautiful Rock Springs, and the campsites are all huge and private.  A huge highlight of this visit is that we hosted my oldest (10-year-old) nephew by himself for the first time (that is, without either parent and without his siblings).  We've babysat all 4 kids a couple times, but this is the first time we've had just one for a dedicated fun weekend focused on him.

Our campsite at Kelly Park - the 'fun' area is tucked away
way back there behind the trees - nice and private!

Before I get into the nephew weekend...a couple of maintenance updates.  We had thought replacing the fuel filter a few sites back was going to fix the weird engine lag issue we experienced, and it went away for a few drives, but came back on our way here, so the fuel filter didn't fix it after all...it's also possible we got some bad diesel fuel, so we're going to wait for another fill up before pursuing any more expensive fixes.  Then our first night at Kelly Park our refrigerator went out in the middle of the night (why is it always the middle of the night for the refrigerator??) with an overheating error.  The next day Aaron diagnosed and figured out that the fan that is supposed to cool the outside heating coils was not working...because the thermostat that turns it on had died.  He rewired the fan before our nephew arrived so that we could turn the fan on manually and ordered the new thermostat, which arrived at the end of our stay - he got it installed and now everything is working great!  

Aaron up on the roof diagnosing the issue

With his new wiring apparatus to allow us to switch the fans on

Ok, now on to my nephew's visit!  We met him with his father about halfway between our campsite and their house to pick him up, and by the time we got back to the campsite it was getting a little dark, but he was still eager to have a campfire and cook dinner outside!  We had 'hillbilly burritos' from a campfire cookbook I had, cooked in pie irons my aunt gave us at Thanksgiving.  Our nephew loved it!  He assembled and cooked his own.  

Cooking dinner in the pie irons

Our nephew with the fruits of his labor!

We had a fun-filled Saturday, starting with cinnamon biscuits for breakfast - my nephew doesn't like raisins and always picks them out of the cinnamon raisin biscuits I make, so since it was just him, I left them out as a special treat!  We traipsed over all the trails in the park either walking or biking.  Aaron and I had been on the main trail in previous visits, but this time we went on ALL the trails.  It was fun and a little exhausting - we even temporarily wore out my nephew, which is hard to do!

Cinnamon biscuits for breakfast

Aaron was full of all sorts of good ideas...

Beginning our bike ride from the campsite

A much needed break after a long bike ride!

They invented a dogfight football game while I cooked - one
threw a football and the other kicked a soccer ball at the same
time (so they were both on offense and defense)

My nephew asked to go back to Blue Spring State Park, which happened to be on the way back to his house, so we stopped there on the way taking him home.  We'd had a bit of a cold snap and there were 444 manatees at the park that day!!  Wow!  We saw lots of babies, including one that seemed to be only about 2 feet long hovering next to his mother's back.  Amazing!

444 Manatees!

My nephew is attempting to point at the manatee

Manatees!  Including the baby one!

We went out on the boat with my sister's family to celebrate my niece's birthday later that day.

On the boat with my sister's kids

Our stay at Kelly Park was great, and we really enjoyed having our eldest nephew all alone for the weekend - we'll have to do it again!

Christmas and Dogsitting at Winter Garden

Here begins our can't-find-an-RV-park drama...when I looked for a Thousand Trails site over Christmas, the only one I could find out of our regular candidates was Winter Garden RV Resort.  This was disappointing as 2 months earlier we had hoped to just stay near Daytona (and nearer my sister), but Winter Garden is a decent park in a decent location (especially if we don't care about going to Disney), so this wasn't so bad.

Our campsite at Winter Garden - we were REALLY close to that 
trailer on the left - could see right into their dining room from ours

We spent a few days at my sister's place to celebrate Christmas together.  I bought the kids a 'ninjabread' cookie kit from Aldi that was a HUGE hit!  I always love it when I can come up with something they enjoy on my own (as opposed to having my sister tell me what to get!).  We had a fun few days cooking and playing games and having the kids open their presents from us before leaving Christmas Eve.

Ninjabread cookie making!

Aaron with a couple nephews

Christmas Eve breakfast!  Note the Christmas tree waffles!

We left the house with my sister's dog, Beamer, in tow.  They were headed to her in-laws' house after Christmas on a plane, so we kept Beamer while they were away.  He loved traveling in our car (he can see out the window, which he can't do in their car because he has to be in the footspace) and loved all the new smells at the RV park.  We took care of him once before, so this time he settled right in, ate right away, and knew right where he wanted to sleep.  Even though the RV is pretty tiny, he still stayed in whatever room we were in...even when we were both in the bathroom getting ready for bed at night (that's a tiny space for two adults and a dog!!).  The only downside is that we had him for New Year's Eve with the fireworks...which he did NOT enjoy.  As long as we would sit with him where he could snuggle under our legs he was fine, but he didn't appreciate it when we got up and moved around!  I took SO many pictures of the adorable puppy (ok he's 11, not a puppy...but he's so cute!), I restrained myself to just post these three.

We had Beamer for Christmas morning and brought his stocking
from my sister's place so Santa could find him!

Isn't he so cute????

New Year's Eve :-(

Even though we hadn't planned to be so close to Orlando, Winter Garden is actually super convenient (30 minute-ish drive) to 3 of the 4 Orange County parks that we'll be popping in and out of, so from a gas savings point of view it's actually really good we stopped here!  

Happy New Year!!