Category: Blog Series

Hello, everyone! The picture above is of beautiful Matlacha Bay. Matlacha is the little island between Pine Island and the mainland of Florida. I took this picture off the Matlacha Drawbridge. Yes, Matlacha still has a drawbridge and ships really do come through the Matlacha Pass. You’re looking at one side of the pass and the Matlacha Bay. People are always fishing off this bridge and another bridge in Matlacha, known as the “fishingest bridge in the world.” Isn’t the bay beautiful? I spent some time “sitting on the dock of the bay” today. Hmmm…..sounds like a song. 🙂

I love to look at the ocean, gaze at the water, and look at the horizon. I took time to do that today. It soothes my soul.

The weather here today was wonderful. The temperature was pushing 80 degrees, calm wind, low humidity. The first thing I did this morning was to take my dog, Betsy, on a long walk. Almost everyone who owns a RV in these RV parks seems to have a dog! Dogs of all breeds, mixed breeds, and just dogs of all shapes, ages, and sizes. Betsy enjoys her walks immensely and I love walking her. It’s the best exercise I’ve gotten in a while. Not only is it cold where I live, it’s mountainous. It’s hard for me to walk and hard on Betsy. Love being in Florida! This island is flat and sandy. Great for walking and biking.

Another reason for my determination to walk Betsy is that she is just a bit chubby right now. Her vet prescribed three short walks per day. We’re doing that. I ride my bikes and take long walks on my own and, if it is early in the morning, I will take Betsy on a long walk before it gets hot.

One of my friends in Pine Island RV Park is an artist. She comes to Pine Island for six months every year. While she’s here, she makes crafts out of local materials like coconuts. I have several of her creations and I love them. I put them on my patio in the summer at home and, of course, on the patio of the RV. You will see a picture of the wonderful pink flamingo that Susie makes at the end of this blog post. 🙂 She makes other South Florida-related creatures as well. I met Susie, and her husband, Kelly, the first year we came to Pine Island. Kelly, unfortunately, is no longer with us. Susie keeps right on coming to Pine Island because of all her friends here. This year, I got one of the alligators she made. I will share him with you sometime! I also have a wood stork and a bee.

This may sound crazy, but I love to go to the grocery in Florida in the winter! Why? The grocery stores where I live just don’t compare, especially in the winter. I suppose it isn’t a fair comparison. After all, Florida is one of our bread baskets. I went to the big Publix Supermarket today that is about 10 miles from our park. Oh my goodness! I had forgotten about their produce. I wanted to buy every fresh vegetable in the store. We stayed in for dinner tonight. My husband grilled something for himself. I had crab and a huge salad made from those wonderful fresh vegetables. I was in heaven! The tomatoes here are to die for at this time of year!

Today was the day for my husband to work on the TV. We had cable TV in our RV but my husband, a TV buff, wanted satellite TV. Years ago, he bought a dish for the bus. So he spent most of the day trying to set up the satellite for the RV only to find out that he needs something from the satellite company to do it. It’s on its way to him at the park.

The days are starting to fly by here. By the time all this was finished today, the day was over and dark had fallen!

Tomorrow will be exciting. We’re going to go to the Everglades! This is a trip we take every time we come to South Florida. I’ll blog about the Everglades tomorrow night! More from “Adventures” then!

The palms

Sunset over the lake

Palm by the lake

First Day in Paradise!

The first nice thing today was that I didn’t have to be in a moving vehicle! I think I will feel like I am moving for several days. If I’m in a moving vehicle, it will be a car and it won’t be on a noisy interstate! This, I say, after almost 1100 miles in the RV! I’ll get over it!

It was nice to wake up this a.m. with the sun shining, blue sky, and it was already above 70 degrees! I woke up pretty early which is a habit. I hope I can learn to sleep a little later over the next few weeks. I would like to feel a little lazy. When I walked outside this a.m., I saw the Pine Island RV Park for the first time in a couple of years. It looks beautiful. Some real improvements have been made recently. Concrete pads for almost every site and every RV’er knows how important that is. At least my husband thinks it is. Large sites, at least in our section. Someone to come help set up the cable TV. I was able to set up the fairly easy WiFi myself and bandwidth seems good. A patio with picnic table. Firepit. Room for the car we towed. I’ve been to enough RV parks to know that this is, indeed, a very nice park.

There are parts of the park where the RVs are a little closer together but we knew where to park! The reason the RV’s are close together is because most are so large now. The sites used to be plenty big enough. Other parts of the park, such as our part, have sites that are still large enough. The park has three lakes that have been maintained really well. The only odd thing is that wood storks used to populate the park. I have not yet seen any which is very strange. I can’t imagine where they have gone. They were here each of the five years we were. They roosted in the trees all around the park.

Before you ask, even though there are three lakes, I have never seen an alligator in this RV park. Not so with the Naples RV park. You practically trip over them there. Both last night and tonight when we were out, I didn’t notice any bugs. No mosquitoes. Nothing. Again, this beats Naples where, one year, I got eaten alive by bugs. Of course, Naples is more tropical.

One thing we really noticed. This is our sixth year at this park. We have never ever seen it so full. It is almost completely full. People appear to be RV’ing this winter.

All seems to be well with Pine Island RV Park. I still love it as much as ever. I had some errands to do today and had to be away from the park but I hope to be around most of the day tomorrow. I’d like to ride my bike on the well-paved roads, walk my dog even more than today, visit friends, and just enjoy myself. I think we will stay in for dinner tomorrow night. I did not make it to the fruit farms at the northern end of the island today, but I may try to do that tomorrow. I want to learn more about the fruit operations. For our own personal use, I did pick up some awesome tomatoes at a local fruit stand along with locally grown lettuce and strawberries which will help make a salad tomorrow night.

I realized today that I have never introduced one member of my little family to you. At the end of this post, you will meet Tigger, our yellow tabby cat, who is more like a dog, and loves to travel in the RV! You’ll laugh at the pose and where he is.

It was a long and rather arduous RV trip to Pine Island this year. I’m so glad we came! I’m surely not a person who could be a full-time RV’er. But, I can be an RV-adventurer and really enjoy it!

More tomorrow from “Adventures!”

Here is Tigger! On the dashboard of the RV!

We have ARRIVED!!!

Good evening, all! It’s not as late as I write this tonight as it was last night. We’ve arrived at our destination! We are at Pine Island, Florida. An island north of Sanibel Island and right off the coast of Ft. Myers and Cape Coral, Florida. Pine Island is not your typical tourist hangout. It is still a little bit of “Old Florida.” It is not developed into a cement and skyscraper environment. Most of it is zoned as agricultural land. Some of Florida’s finest fishing is done around Pine Island and in Matlacha Pass.

Matlacha is a small island between Pine Island and the mainland. The village of Matlacha is a haven for artists and writers as is Pine Island. Crops grown on Pine Island include palm trees for shipping to Arizona and California, mangos, and lychee fruit. Pine Island fruit is very sought after. I will tell you much more about Matlacha, Pine Island, and the other small towns on Pine Island as I explore them this next few weeks. This will be my sixth time here visiting their very nice RV park as a snow bird.

Along with exploring everything about Pine Island, I will take a trip, and take you with me, into the Everglades. Other trips into Central Florida. We will even spend a few days on a sunny beach in the panhandle. So, now that I’ve arrived, there will be lots of adventures and lots and lots of photographs I want to share with you.

We put in about seven hours on the road today and it was mostly uneventful. I calculated our mileage tonight. It was 1052 miles from my home in northeastern Kentucky to this little island in the sea. I think I feel every one of them. 🙂 We arrived after dark or I would have taken some photos for tonight’s blog post. All we had time to do was park the RV and visit with friends.

You may be wondering about friends in a RV park. Pine Island is such a great place that the same people come back year after year. It has been a couple of years since I have been here but most of my friends are here as they are every winter. I got to see a few of them tonight and will see more tomorrow. Then, we went to Bert’s Bar and Grill in Matlacha for a quick dinner. Bert’s has been written up in food publications, particularly their grouper sandwiches. That is what I was going to have to eat, until I saw LOBSTER ROLLS on their menu. Grouper will have to wait until my next visit to Bert’s, probably tomorrow! I had the best large lobster roll I have ever eaten!

Bert’s is an experience. We sat there and ate and listened to a live band play classic rock. Santana, if you can believe that, and they did an excellent job. I was off in my own little rock and roll world. It was 70 degrees on Bert’s patio, Santana playing, and lobster. How can you beat that!? Oh, I forgot. The patio is on the Gulf of Mexico! I remember listening to Santana when…..oh…..never mind! 🙂

Then, back to the RV. Everyone is in bed and I’m finishing this post to you. Tomorrow, I’ll start taking pictures and will describe everything to you. More “Adventures” coming your way then!

Whew! Remember last night’s post, when I said that I was going to sleep late this morning, linger over several cups of tea, yadda yadda yadda? SILLY ME!!! Just let me tell you what happened this morning at the RV Park in Ringgold, Georgia we hurriedly pulled into last night! Before 7 a.m., I heard beeping outside the RV. Then the sound of big trucks. Then heavy equipment. Right outside our RV! I drug myself out of bed and peeped out the window. As I looked, a crew of men dropped a telephone pole on the bank right above our RV! The crash woke up my husband and he comes roaring out of bed and I do mean roaring. We stood there in incredulous silence (because we couldn’t hear each other). Why had they parked us in that particular spot?

I drank a cup of tea and he drank a cup of coffee. We pulled out of there before 8 a.m. but not before getting our money back. Unbelievable. This did not start the day off particularly well. We were approximately at the northern border of Georgia at that point.

We had not had showers. We had not fed the dog or ourselves. We had done nothing that we normally do in the mornings. Plus the RV needed gas. I needed to stop losing my mind. We drove a little way and pulled off in Calhoun, Georgia at a Flying J. We decided, since we didn’t get much sleep the night before, that the driver needed to sleep and I needed to rest. I, you see, seldom sleep much. So my husband got a few hours sleep while I did chores around the RV, did some computer work, and took care of Betsy (my dog). I tried to sleep, really I did. It just was not going to happen. About 4 p.m., we pulled out of the Flying J and decided to drive at night. I knew that we would go through Atlanta right at rush hour. “Oh well,” I thought, “why not make a really bad day worse.” That it did.

It’s not far from Calhoun to Atlanta and the heavy traffic started as soon as we got on I75. It was wall-to-wall 18-wheelers from Atlanta to way past Macon. In Atlanta, the rush hour traffic was not to be believed. My cousin, Liza, lives in Atlanta and works downtown. So, I decided to call her and let her join me in my misery. Except Liza was not in Atlanta that day. A business trip had taken her out of town. She got my message and called me back and laughed at ME sitting in rush hour Atlanta traffic. That was just not fair. I’m sure she still finds it amusing! It took hours to get from the north to the south side of that city.

We finally got past Macon and it is still many miles to Valdosta, Georgia, which was our goal for the day. We arrived at the Flying J there at 12:40 a.m.

Just about the only thing that had not gone wrong today was something mechanical with the RV……knock on wood!

After eating a bite, doing some RV chores like washing dishes (no dishwasher), setting up WiFi, and sending husband, dog, and cat off to bed, here I am! It’s only 3 a.m. and I am just now winding down. But, we are literally in shouting distance of the Florida state line! It’s 58 degrees at 3 a.m. in very southern Georgia. Not bad. We have 357 (approximately) more miles to go to reach our destination. I am so very ready to get there! It might be tomorrow!

More from “Adventures” tomorrow evening when I am more coherent and when we just might have arrived! For your viewing pleasure, perhaps, below is Betsy, a very good traveler: