The Tour, the Jack, the Carts and the Week-End

Thursday –Sunday                                                         Most Recent Posts:
February 25-28, 2016                                                    A Contemplative Walk By the River
Koreshan State Historic Site                                          Time Off for a Beach Break at Lover’s Key
Estero, Florida

 

THURSDAY

 

Today I walked the path over to the settlement to take the 10am tour.  I didn’t remember that it starts just off the parking lot and so I went directly to the Art Building.  When I got there three people were sitting inside talking all about the Koreshans so I sat down to listen.  What an interesting conversation.  It appears I had stumbled on one of the Koreshan descendents who was being taken on a private tour by the most knowledgable docent and by the local College history professor who wrote the book I talked about yesterday The Allure of Immortality.  What a lucky coincidence!  Wish I had read the book already.  I wasn’t able to go on this private tour obviously but it was very interesting listening to these 3 knowledgable people talking about the members of the Koreshan Unity as if they were friends they had just seen not too long ago. 

As they are leaving the ARt Building for the tour, in walks the public tour group which met out front and has gone over a lot of the basic history already.  Luckily I already know that.  But they come in and sit down in the Art Hall where the building and its contents are discussed.  Joan is the volunteer leading the tour.  I find out that  she is here for two months and does similar two month stints at other Florida State Parks for two months each before moving north to Volunteer in Michigan State Parks.   That’s another way to full time.

Joan takes us around to most of the buildings and talked about each one.  The picture above is the Domkohler House,  a replica of the  original home on the property when the Koreshans purchased it from Gustave Damkohler in 1893.

 

This bedroom belonged to one fo the Planetary Court Sisters.  They ran the business end of the group and had individual rooms rather than beds in the women’s dormatories.  You can tell from the furnishings which they brought with them from Chicago that they were upper class and upper middle class women trying to maintain their status at the turn of the 20th century in a Florida swamp..

 

After the tour, I stop by the Cowboy Cafe which operates on Thursdays from 11am until all the food is gone. I got there just in time, about 11:45. They use recipes from the Florida Cracker Cowboys of the 1800s. I was so busy watching their work and eating their samples that I didn’t take one picture. It’s similar to the Sunday Cast Iron kitchen although at the Cowboy Cafe, they have beans and cornbread along with Johnny cakes and peach crisp.

When I return David is work on fixing the control box to solder the base for the fuse back onto the board.  The fuse melted and also melted the solder holding the fuse base on the board which is why it had to be repaired before we can go on to fixing the jack.

 

 

Very fine detailed soldering work.

Neither of us remembered that the Cowboy Cafe was on Thursdays or I’m sure David would have gone over.  The tour just happened luckily to end there.

 

 

FRIDAY

 

 

The two new solenoids ordered, since we have already replaced the back two but not the front two, arrived yesterday.  With the board fixed, David can now install the solenoid for the right jack and we are  hoping that will fix things as it did with the other two problem jacks in the back a few years ago. 

BUT, it didn’t.  The jack will still not go down. So now he has to call HWH back to find out what next.   Of course it’s Friday afternoon and they will take our number and call us back.  That means Monday no doubt.

 

Our new beach and laundry cart comes today and David quickly puts it together. Love those big wide beach tires.   I’ll give it the test run tomorrow taking it to the campground laundry.

 

 

This picture on the box shows what will be one of its major uses for us.  No more lugging chairs, umbrella, cooler, towels, bags with sunscreen, books etc.  They all fit on the cart.

 

 

Of course there is only so much storage room so when one thing comes in, another has to go out.  I’m trying to figure out how to reorganize to accomodate the bigger cart.  We have a smaller one that wasn’t useful at the beach and we didn’t use it much for anything else..  We plan to pass that on to someone else.  Probably at the laundry tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

SATURDAY

 

This morning I’m off to do the laundry carting everything over easily in my new cart. 

 

 

Here it is beside its little brother who is being left for adoption with a free sign on its handle.

 

In the afternoon we decide to do something fun after all these jack problems and the laundry.  We take in our second movie in the 5 years we’ve been on the road.  It took us 3 years on the road to take in a movie in Bar Harbor Maine in July 0f 2013.  That first one included the infamous world’s absolutely worst pizza.  You can find it here if you want to know what to avoid.

 

It’s taken us another 3 years to decide to go see a second movie.  This one is The Woman in the Van starring Maggie Smith and we went solely and completely to see her and to have a giant barrel of movie house popcorn.  Maggie Smith did an outstanding job as we knew she would portraying this aging quirky woman who parks her van in the driveway of a London Playwrite for 15 years.  The movie wasn’t a good enough vehicle for her in my estimation and our popcorn was much better than the $7.50 a barrel movie popcorn.  So I imagine it will be at least another 3 years before we forget enough about going to the movies to do it again.

When we come back in the park and ask about mail we find that David’s belated birthday gift has arrived.  Carrie sent David a card with a “gift certificate” for the final season of Downton Abbey. We have a hard time making sure that we always have a TV signal on Sunday nights so we can see Downton so a couple of years ago, Carrie began giving us the DVD so we could watch it whenever we like.  But it isn’t released until late January.  So as soon as it came out Carrie sent it to her dad.  We look forward to watching more of Maggie Smith and the rest of the cast.   THANK YOU CARRIE!!

 

 

 

SUNDAY

 

Today is Sunday and that means our last Farmer’s Market and the Cast Iron Cafe.  On the way David’s eagle eye notices there are blossoms on the Washingtonian Palms.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Plant City strawberries are finally availabale.  The Strawberry Festival is too far for us to visit but it’s going on this week in Plant City Florida.

 

David can’t decide between these two mangos so he buys them both. $1 each.

 

After we get the veggies I want to stroll over to the Gopher Tortoise’s back door near the grave of the only Koreshan buried on the current Koreshan grounds.  There are two small graveyards but they are both on property that was sold before the state took over what is now the state park.

We’ve always seen the tortoise at his front door which is in the mound on the far end of the grounds but this year there is green foliage over the entrance indicating that he has not been going in and out.  I was really thrilled to find him here today.

You can see him in the middle of the picture above the red arrow.

 

 

Yes I know, lots of pictures.  I like him!

 

Also on our way to the Cowboy Cafe we see our little red cart being pulled by someone else.  Those give aways always work.

 

 

 

When we arrive at the cafe they are cutting the last of the bread.  They have honey butter to spread on it.

 

 

Pancakes are on the wood stove.

 

There is a bread in the cast iron pot and coals to put over it are getting hot.

 

This they tell us is bread pudding.  Looks  like a cobbler to me.

 

Here’s the menu for today.  We taste the bread pudding, the buckwheat pancakes, the white bread

 

People are gathering around for the bread pudding.  Look who is up in the front.

 

 

They call these cat faced biscuits.  They cook in a cast iron skillet, in the cast iron stove oven and are served with gravy of course.

 

After all those Cast Iron Cafe snacks we don’t need lunch so David decides to take a shower and get his hair cut.

Before the stem cell transplant I had cut his hair for years.  But afterwards his hair had changed and become soft but wiry if that makes sense and I couldn’t layer it in the same way I had before.   So he went to a hairdresser and hated the way she did it.  So I was rehired and we’re hoping for the best.

 

 

Here it is.  Not great but better than the $25 haircut that he hated and Free.