Cold and Windy Start to 2018

January 1- January 6, 2018                                                                    Most Recent Posts:
Sebastian Inlet State Park                                                                    It’s a Wrap: 2017 Year Review
Vero Beach, Florida                                                                                Ending 2017 – Before and After Our Trip

We’ve spent many winters in Florida and determined early on that if you want to avoid temperatures in the 30’s for winter you have to be south of Tampa in January and February.  So that’s what we do including this year.   But for January 2018 that didn’t work. 

Here we are in Vero Beach Florida latitude definitely south of Tampa and for our first week here, with the wind chill factor, we’ve been down to 29 degrees.   The temperatures were unusually low and the winds  HIGH as in up to 30 mph.

We didn’t been spend a lot of time outside.  The wind just made it too cold.  The opportuniaty to be outside in the winter is THE reason we come to Florida so I have serious envy of fellow bloggers in Desert Hot Springs California and Mesa, Arizona.  I learned that even folks in  Ouray Colorado are sporting shorts.   What IS going on here?

On New Year’s day we leave Gamble Rogers and drive 149 miles south on  I –95 in wind and rain from Flagler Beach to Sebastian Inlet in Vero Beach.  We think we are escaping the 25 mph winds only to find ourselves in 27 mph winds.   It’s a gray day and takes 4 hoss pads on each of the passenger wheels to level up in site 24.

We are very lucky that just when we arrived there was a dry window and the rain didn’t come back until we had done a very minimal set up.  Thanks to the weather gods for that.

But over the next week there are very few breaks in the bad weather.  Of course north of us they are seeing single digits and minus numbers so we’re mindful of how much worse it could be. 

One day I stepped outside to get a picture of the white caps on Indian Inlet.  You can see the rain drops on the picture.  The winds were 27 or 28 mph and there was a kite surfer out.  I figure he must have been 16 or so to be that stupid.

We spent two full days with our slides in due to the winds and not wanting to take any chance of having them twisted.  We put them back out when the winds got to 20 mph or less.

Our Progressive Industries EMS kept cutting off when we tried to do almost anything.  I assume that everyone in the park, being inside, was trying to run electric heaters and use their hot water heaters and microwaves.   We just bundled up during the day and used electric blankets at night.. Yes, that’s 39 at 8:30am and a low of 37 overnight and that’s without the wind chill factor IN SOUTH FLORIDA.

We did get a big kick out of these guys in a site behind us trying to set up tents in this wind.   I think they must be related to the kite surfer.

I really wanted to go out and see what the ocean was doing in this weather so when the rain took a short break and it was only the wind, we hustled out to walk over to the ocean.  David didn’t think it was warm enough.  He didn’t bring gloves, I did!

I guess I should not have been surprised to see the fishermen out on the pier but boy they must have been freezing standing around in this wind over the water.

Skimmers and terns were hunkered down on the shore.

I’m not sure if you are allowed to surf on this side of the bridge but no one was out today except the  crazy dedicated fishermen.

The strong winds were blowing the spray back off of the waves.  We walked straight out, took these pictures and hustled back to Winnona and out of the wind.

We were actually able to keep the coach warm just by doing some cooking.  What’s better than soup on a cold day?  So I made a big pot of sweet potato and black bean soup one day and we warmed some of that up when David used our cast iron tortilla press to make fresh tortilla chips to go with it.  We were glad to have all of our boondocking tools like our cast iron griddle for the gas stove available given the low electricity problems.

I forgot to take the picture until David was on his second bowl and I was nearly finished with my first.  It was a delicious soup.

The weather did make for some beautiful sunsets and after color.

Other ways to occupy your time in bad weather.  Play board games like Sequence and The Birding Game which we are playing here.  If you can’t go birding outside then go birding inside.

We also took advantage of the down time to do a thorough inside house cleaning. Nothing like bad weather to force you into chores .  Look carefully, you are actually seeing David with a broom in his hand.  HA!

Over our second week, the weather began to clear and we actually did get out on the beach.  We also celebrated David’s birthday but more on that next time.

One last sunset over the Indian River.  It was wonderful that the sunset was literally right out our back door since there were no sunrises visible this week over the ocean due to all the cloudy weather.