Tripometer – 15,878 mi
Gas Gauge – 1257.666 gal
Location – Long Point Park and Campground, Melbourne Beach, FL
Lodging – $35
Cans of OFF – 4
This campground is tremendously quiet. That probably won’t last through the weekend, but for now we’re really enjoying the lack of hustle and bustle. While Kelly worked, Paul continued his blog work in the shade of the awning. It’s a hot day, in the mid to upper 80s and it feels wonderful. In the mid-morning our neighbor from two sites down spotted a racoon behaving oddly in the middle of the campground loop. Sadly it was immediately apparent that it was rabid. Paul called the park office and informed them of the situation, expecting that they would call the authorities, but what happened was a little more surprising. A mere 5 minutes from placing the call a young woman from the front desk showed up on a golf cart with an animal cage and a dog catcher’s pole, scooped up the racoon, and drove off as though this were something that happens every day. That experience made us completely re-evaluate how we look at racoons in this area. If rabid animals are so common that the desk clerk at the campground office takes care of them on their own within minutes, we need to be on high alert for racoons around Ranger. Scary stuff. We learned later that some estimates say that 50% of the racoons in Florida are carriers of the disease. Yikes.
It was generally a quiet day in camp. We fished, swam, worked, and took it easy while trying to stay cool (!) in the heat. At lunch time we drove in to Vero Beach for food, groceries, and a few staples at the local Publix.
Ranger had another amazing day. He has been enjoying the wildlife around our campsite tremendously. The pelicans are of unusual size here and are constantly diving for fish along the waterway behind our site. In addition, we have seen several pods of bottle nosed dolphins swim by. We managed to catch a picture of Ranger the first time he saw a dolphin. He’s seen us pull fish from the water on several occasions but he clearly had not imagined that something this large lived in the water. He kept looking over his shoulder at us as though confirming that we too saw what he was seeing. Mind Blown!
There are two great danes staying at a campsite a few down from us who came to visit today. As is the way with great danes, Thunder and Dylan looked more like small horses than dogs, but Ranger recognized the play possibilities and goaded the younger of the two, Thunder, into a vigorous play session which quickly got out of hand (for him). Thunder quickly learned that he could lie on top of Ranger and immobilize him during their tussling. That was fine until they were both tired and Thunder decided to stay lying on top of Ranger for longer than a second or two. After a couple of pitiful sounds from Ranger, Thunder’s owner pulled him off of Ranger and Ranger retreated about 30 feet away from Thunder and sat down with a fairly defeated look on his face. Neither of us have ever seen Ranger walk away from playtime with another dog. Apparently that was a bit too much. While the two danes visited us, a couple of much smaller dogs walked by with their owner but didn’t stop. The dane’s owner jokingly called them ‘treats on feet’ which we found hilarious.
Paul’s fishing was less successful than he had hoped for. He started fishing today with cut shrimp and was rewarded with 4 or 5 very small catfish, on the order of 6-10 inches. Not what we were looking for. We’ll have to try some different tactics.
Tomorrow Kelly has a press release in the morning and we are planning on driving up to Cape Canaveral for a SpaceX launch at 1pm. To get all of that done Kelly has to wake up crazy early in the morning. It was a very early night.
Paul went for a shower in the late evening to find the absolute worst showers we’ve experienced on the trip. One of the bathrooms in the park is being torn down and replaced so they’ve brought in a shower trailer with 6 extraordinarily small shower stalls, all with cord actuated shower heads. In other words, to actuate the water you had to maintain constant pressure on the cord. Imagine having to shampoo your hair with one hand while pulling down on a cord with your other. Awful. (We learned the next morning that the next bathroom down had much better showers without pull cords).