Tripometer – 15,829 mi
Gas Gauge – 1257.666 gal
Location – Long Point Park and Campground, Melbourne Beach, FL
Lodging – $35
Cans of OFF – 4
It’s another beautifully warm and sunny day in camp. Kelly spent much of the morning working on social media while Paul packed up the trailer for the move (loosely, as our next campsite was no more than 3 or 4 miles from here.) We were packed up and on our way by 11am. Thankfully, when we arrived our campsite was empty and we immediately settled into our new digs. Ranger was swimming on his personal beach before the trailer jacks had even hit the ground.
We made one stop along the way to our new campsite for ice and bottled water. We’re switching to bottled water for two reasons. Firstly, we are both still feeling queasy almost every day (as well as other symptoms which we won’t discuss in detail). The owners manual for our camper recommends sterilizing the water system every three months. We haven’t done that on this trip because we’ve been mostly hooked to chlorinated water supplies and have been using the water system daily without fail, but as we’ve been trying to figure out why we feel bad this has come up as a possibility. Secondly, as is often the case on barrier islands, the water tastes like the swamp. Swampy coffee sucks.
While Kelly swam and swam and swam Ranger, Paul got camp all set up, worked on the blog, rigged our fishing poles for salt water and generally soaked up the sunshine. It didn’t take either of us very long to conclude that we would be staying in this campground longer than just this week. Our plan for Florida is just to get warm and relax a little before heading back to reality in Maryland. We had originally planned to travel as far south as the Everglades and the keys, but this just doesn’t seem to make much sense now. Camping in extreme south Florida is both expensive and difficult to get reservations in this time of year. We know if we were to move into that area we would likely spend much of our time moving campgrounds rather than relaxing, fishing, swimming, and devouring the weather. With that said, we booked a site here for next weekend as soon as we found out they had availability in the campground. How lucky is that?
We spent this evening finishing off the last of the boudin and red beans and rice from New Orleans while watching a distant thunderstorm over the ocean. While walking the dog in the later part of the evening after dark, Paul caught a snippet of conversation that will haunt us for at least the next 24 hours. The sentence was “… He was hopped up on probiotics and hormones…”. We tried for quite a while to figure out what context would make that a reasonable sentence but we’re guessing the person was thinking of steroids? Too damned funny.
As we fell asleep this evening we were serenaded by the ocean waves in the distance broken by the sounds of fish jumping in the water behind our trailer. Ranger is nigh on unconscious.