Thursday, April 8 through Wednesday, April 21, 2010: At Flagler Beach, Florida (Near Daytona Beach):
The trip to Flagler Beach(more than 300 miles) was longer than we're used to, but it was uneventful. Flagler Beach is 20 miles north of Daytona Beach, about one-third of the way between Daytona Beach and Saint Augustine. We're staying at the Bulow RV Resort, an Encore resort. It's a nice place---lots of grass, big old trees, huge sites---but since it's out of season, there aren't many people here and not much to do at the resort itself. We'll have to improvise. The night we arrived we all went to dinner up the coast at JT's Seafood Shack. It had been advertised in the resort handout, and I expected a small, unpopular place. It was mobbed and we had to wait almost an hour for a table, but the food was excellent. It turned out to be a lot of fun.

Friday afternoon there was a luau at the pool.


The Wheelers and we wore the Hawaiian shirts Becky and I got at Meghan's bat mitzvah four years ago. (Bill and Kim Shelton gave us theirs, and we gave those to the Wheelers some time ago.) People thought we must be related. We played with that a little.

On Saturday we had some rain, so Becky and I made a post office trip through the nearby town of Ormond Beach, which is much bigger and more beautiful than Flagler Beach. There we toured "The Casements" which was the winter home of John D. Rockefeller for several years. After he died, the family sold it and it had gone through several owners and various stages of abandonment, until the city purchased it and it has now been fixed up. Unfortunately, the various changes through the years have made it impossible to know what it was like when Rockefeller was there, so its historical relevance is minor. The name comes from the fact that the windows are all of the casement type, and there are a zillion of them.

On Sunday Becky and Pat went on an 11-mile walk---Becky tuning up for her Havasupai hike at the end of April.

After that, we toured the waterfront area of Flagler Beach and (next door) Ormond Beach, and had lunch in Flager Beach---at the ocean. Flagler Beach, in Flagler County, is named after Henry Flagler, who, it turns out, was John D. Rockefeller's partner in starting Standard Oil. Not surprisingly, he was a very wealthy man. He built the railroad that first connected Miami with Key West (and the intervening keys), and his name is on buildings and institutions all over the state.

On Tuesday we travelled to the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse in Daytona Beach. It is a quite well-preserved bit of history, they having saved the outbuildings that housed the staff, etc. There is a small park next door, where we picnicked.


On Wednesday, after a trip to the lady who is repairing the bronze "Lady With A Hoop" piece of sculpture we managed to break (and which she is having a lot of trouble fixing), we visited Cecil and Marie Peak, who worked with all of us at the North Rim one year and with the Wheelers one year at Yellowstone.


Their off-season home is in a trailer park near Fruitland Park. (Their on-season home is in Kentucky.) The Peaks are a lot of fun and Marie made us a delicious lunch. We then walked around the park and were attacked by swarms of bugs. Ugh. It is said that the state bird of Florida is the mosquito, and I believe it.

On Thursday Becky drove to Orlando to have lunch with Fernando, a Thai fellow that worked for Becky at the South Rim. He's now working at Disney's Animal Kingdom.

On Saturday we all went for a 9-mile bike ride through some nearby subdivisions. The homes were uniformly quite beautiful, quite varied in design, with some being quite palacial in size.

On Sunday we went to Saint Augustine to visit Cathy Brown, an old friend from Los Angeles, and her husband, Warren (Butler). Cathy moved to the area almost 20 years ago after her first husband passed away. They live in a beautifully maintained (restored?) historic house (built in 1903) in downtown Saint Augustine. It was great fun catching up. She served us a delicious lunch, of course.

On Monday, the Wheelers visited some old friends, Becky got her hair cut, and I polyurethaned some new plywood squares that we use under our wheels and stabilizers to separate us from whatever is underneath our trailer. I made the original squares more than 7 years ago in the garage of our Pasadena house, and they are looking a little weathered. A few of them were even well-gnawed by gophers that lived under our rig (actually, under the squares) at Zion.

On Tuesday, the Peaks came and took the Wheelers away to Saint Augustine for the day while Becky and I took a 159 mile trip (it was supposed to be 150 miles, but I missed a turn that added 9 miles) to pick up the now-repaired "Girl With A Hoop" ststue we broke a few weeks ago. Tuesday night, we met everyone for a nice dinner at the River Grill in Ormond Beach.

On Wednesday, we all had lunch at a strange buffet restaurant (Holiday House) in DeLand with the Wheelers and Bob and Lori---some former Xanterra folks the Wheelers worked with at several locationa. They were nice people, and it was fun to hear how they fared with the folks we knew at the locations where they worked. After lunch we went to Blue Spring State Park, where there is an amazingly clear spring-fed lake. Interesting.

When we weren't doing memorable things, Pat and Becky usually went shopping and Bill and I essentially vegged out. Tomorrow it's off the South Carolina and points North, finally leaving Florida.

Thursday, April 1, through Wednesday, April 7, 2010: At Fort Lauderdale, Florida:
The trip to Fort Lauderdale was again short and sweet---except that we had a little problem finding our RV park---and had to turn our truck and trailer around in a nearby small parking lot. It turned out to be fine, and it unexpectedly prepared us for our arrival at the park. This park is also old and has small sites and narrow internal roads. There was no way we could get into the site they assigned us, even though it was a pull-through. We went to ask the office for a different site, and it was closed for a two-hour lunch. We chose a nearby site we could get into, and later informed the office. They couldn't have cared less. We noticed that they continue to assign our original site to incoming guests, none of whom can get into it. The problem is the location of a large palm tree at the entrance to the site. There are a lot of French Canadian snowbirds here, and they have a party every night. Tonight (Easter Sunday) they have set up in that site, knowing no one will take it.

On Saturday, we travelled to Everglades National Park and Biscayne National Park, both of which are below Miami (175 miles, roundtrip). The Everglades were quite interesting---lots of birds, sawgrass, and water, and we even saw a large turtle and an alligator. Bicayne NP is virtually all water (Florida Bay), so we just observed from the visitor center.



On Sunday, Becky walked from our park to the beach, a five-mile trek. On the way back (I picked her up) we rented The Blind Side. It was a nice, feel-good movie; not a classic.

On Monday, we took the truck (only) and Daisy and headed for an overnight stay in Key West. It's a long way (400 miles roundtrip) but well worth it. We stayed in a lovely inn (Chelsea House)


on U.S. Highway 1, just two blocks off Duval Street, the street in the old section where the fun shops and restaurants are---including the original Margaritaville.


We had a wonderful dinner at Nine One Five, a chi chi restaurant on Duval. Key West is really fun. The old section is filled with well-maintained Victorian houses, some of which are still private homes, but many of which are B&Bs, professional offices, and small stores. The newer parts of town have standard big hotels mixed in. We walked all over the old section, even (like a zillion other tourists) stopping at the monument commemorating the fact that it's the southernmost point in the continental U.S. Very nearby, there are the southernmost hotel, the southernmost house, the southernmost southernmost hotel, etc. You get the idea. It was too crowded to get a picture of ourselves at the point, so we took a picture of a little girl getting her picture taken.


On Wednesday, we had lunch (on them, thank you very much) at a very nice restaurant with some old LA friends (Lydia and Duane Cameron) who moved to the Fort Lauderdale area four years ago. They have a magnificent beachfront condominium on the 17th floor of a lovely new building.
We had last seen them more than seven years ago at a going away party thrown for us by them and some others from Becky's morning workout group at the Los Angeles Athletic Club. After lunch we went to the Sawgrass Recreation Park, which is really a large reservoir in the Everglades (but not inside the national park) where they have airboat tours. We had never taken an airboat ride before. What fun it was, zipping through the sawgrass.

Tomorrow we're off to the Daytona Beach area.

Tuesday, March 30, through Wednesday, March 31, 2010: At Naples, Florida:
The trip to beautiful Naples was short and sweet. The RV park was an old one that had very narrow sites and even narrower internal streets. We were lucky enough to have our choice of the only two pull-throughs that were left. We would never have been able to get into any of the back-ins. We chose the site with the fewest trees and, therefore, the best chance of allowing our rooftop satellite dish to work. It didn't. We muddled through the next two days with DVDs and radio. What survivors!

The day we arrived, the park was throwing an end-of-season party, with music and dancing, right next to our site. (The snowbird season in Florida ends on March 31.) It was OK music and fun to hear the people laughing and having fun.


On Wednesday, we visited the "historic" downtown area of Naples (every city in Florida claims that it's historic) and then went to Costco for the first time in a couple of weeks. (We were having withdrawal pains.) It was mobbed. If someone flew in from outer space, he would think everyone on Florida was a senior citizen---and might be right. I have never seen so many walkers and wheelchairs. But, it was clear that the patrons were not poor old folks. There were many very nice cars (including one Bentley) in the parking lot.

Wednesday night, we had dinner with Chris and Suzanne Armstrong in their beautiful Naples home. Chris is an old co-worker of Becky's from First Interstate Bank---14 years ago. We had a great time, and, due to my miscalculation of the evening temperature, I went home with one of Chris's fleeces.


I was happy to leave that park the next morning; I was getting claustrophobic due to its space limitations. Naturally, in connecting up I paid too much attention to the right side of the truck and hit the trailer's pin box with the left side of the truck---gashing the taillight and denting the fender (a little bit). Oh, well.