Splitting up & a Scary Welcome

Saturday February 22 & Sunday February 23, 2014
Blue Springs State Park
Orange City, Florida

 

SATURDAY

Today is a solo day.

 

Saturday begins cloudy and overcast.  Not David’s idea of a beach day.  He prefers hot and sunny.   Me, I’m an any time it isn’t thundering beach goer.  In fact I prefer a bit cooler and overcast day so I don’t have to deal with the sun and put up an umbrella and slather with sunscreen every 90 minutes.  I can wear light weight long sleeves and long pants and then just put the screen on exposed parts.  I also have a lot of trouble with my eyes in extremely bright sunlight  I worry about getting macular degeneration which has really ruined my dad’s life. So for me, this is the PERFECT beach day.

 

 

Thus we agree to do our own things. But first it’s time for oatmeal pecan pancakes with fresh fruit like Plant City strawberries.  YUM!!   The fruit in Florida during the winter is seriously wonderful.  Oranges and tangerines at stands all over the place.  We made a run to Detweillers when we went up to Sarasota and they had citrus, strawberries, and fresh blueberries and blackberries.   Just wonderful

 

 

 

 

 

David stays at the coach to putter around and cross things off his list.  Unfortunately he takes no pictures of what he’s doing all day.  The better not to get quizzed I suppose.   So all I can post about it was what I did. 

 

 

I head on down to Nokomis beach where I easily find not just a parking space but my favorite one in the corner on the farthest end of the lot.  I’m really surprised at this on a Saturday.  But it looks like there are other folks with David’s opinion that this is not a beach day OR perhaps the winter break people who flooded the beaches earlier in the week have had to return home to their cold northern abodes.   For whatever reason, there are many fewer people here today.   This is more like what I’m accustomed to.

In fact, there are more skimmers and gulls on the beach than people when I arrive.  I love this.

 

 

 

Aren’t their bills amazingly cool??
They hunt by flying across the surface of the ocean with their lower bills in the sea.

 

 

 

 

It’s foggy here too.  I take my umbrella with me “just in case”, set things up and go for a walk in the water.  My battered toe likes walking in the water better than not.  Pretty good waves today for the Gulf.  See what I mean about many fewer people?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Willets are out hunting and soon the waves have attracted the skim boarder boys. Those boys run as fast as their legs can take them into the water, throw down the board, jump on top of it, ride it into the wave and then turn the board around while they are standing on it to ride back to shore……..with more or less success.  Perhaps skim boarding is surfing in the Gulf.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This woman spends over an hour digging a hole and pawing through it looking for sharks’ teeth.  She works at it, then she sits in her chair and rests and comes back and begins again.  There are a lot of people walking around pawing through the sand near the water looking for sharks’ teeth.  One woman has a medicine bottle half filled with them.   Why do they want them?  What do they do with them?

 

 

There are also people collecting bags of shells.  Some have a bag in each hand.  I wonder how long it will take them to empty the beach of shells.   I prefer to take pictures of the things I admire and leave them for someone else to see but hopefully not to keep only for themselves.  Happily this shoreline is pretty much a pile of shells.  I find them beautiful just as the waves have tossed them.   The big ones of course are gone as soon as someone spots them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I spend the entire day here just walking the beach, enjoying the water, the fewer people and reading a book.  It’s a perfect day for me.  Here’s my last picture at Nokomis beach complete with zinc sunscreen on my face.   The fog never lifts.

 

 

 

 

SUNDAY

This morning we pack up and try to get on our way early.  HA! 

 

Somehow it doesn’t matter how much of the outside stuff we pack up the day before, by the time we have breakfast, pack up the inside, bring in the slides, bring up the jacks, dump the tanks, put the dolly back on the RV and the car on the dolly we are lucky to be on the road by 11:00.  I just don’t see why it takes us SO long.  But it does.  I read in a blog yesterday about someone who was on the road at 7am.  This seems impossible to me. 

The 180 miles from Oscar Scherer to Blue Springs is an easy interstate drive.  North on I-75 and East on I-4.  The only really difficult part is driving I-4 through Orlando where that road is absolutely horrible and if we don’t want to shake our house loose from its chassis then we have to drop the speed to 40 or 45 mph tops.

 

 

We make it there just in time to get set up JUST before the rain starts.  WHEW……………

Blue Springs has lovely campsites well separated from each other with lots of “real Florida” all around them.   Their only problem is that the campsites near the walk to the springs all seem to be rather unlevel.  This is our 3rd year here and our third different site and all of them have had this problem.  If we back in, we have to put boards under the tires to keep them on the “ground” and not hanging up in the air.  5th wheels have an easier time of course.

 

 

We get a rather scary welcome to Blue Springs.

 

 

We’re just about to sit down to eat when my phone starts screeching……what IS that noise?  Turns out it’s a weather alert.  We haven’t had one in a LONG time.  I quickly turn on our weather radio to hear that we are under a tornado warning.  Not a watch, a warning.   This is NOT what you want your phone to be telling you.

We quickly try to figure out what county the park is in since they are talking about counties.  When they mention cities, they don’t say Orange City.  But I’m concerned that Orange City is really a “town” since they are talking about the two “cities” just south of us.  

Tornados in Florida in February?  Is this “normal”?   Is anything normal anymore??     In the end the tornado is spotted 12 miles south of us and headed east.  We thankfully get nothing but rain.  Not even particularly high winds.

 

We don’t get out to see the park on our first day because of the storm and rain is predicted for the next 4 days here.  But it can’t rain all the time right?   And even with the warm weather now, there MIGHT be a manatee or two at least at the foot of the spring run.   I’ll check this out tomorrow.