Land-cruising for a Change

Pictures (all in Florida): Several of the close-up manatees in the impossibly clear water at Blue Spring State Park; Tammy and Mike at the Beislers wonderful house; Heidi and Ken canoeing in the mangroves at the Everglades National Park with a group tour; our new Massachusetts decal (our site this day is at the Corps of Engineers locks on the east end of Lake Okechobee), inside Trapper Nelson's cabin in the Jupiter area; the Great Horned owl in Haines City; it still gets dark early in Florida in December!, Marblehead High 1963 classmates at a mini-reunion near Naples (Susie "Wigg", Scott Stephens, Ken)

Starting on December 8th (2013) we are camping our way down the east coast and across to Louisiana to maybe Texas and back. A new chapter of the "cruising" adventures has started. We are not camping in a tent, not roughing it; we have a second-hand travel trailer that has all the basics plus air-conditioning, a queen-sized bed and an "almost" regular refrigerator.
But weather is threatening. We have left Duxbury on the 8th knowing that a storm is approaching from the south and will meet us somewhere in mid-afternoon. It's not better if we wait, since the next day is sure to be snowing at home and we don't want to leave in a snowstorm.  We are fine until midway down New Jersey at about 2 pm, The driving deteriorates quickly and we decide to pull into a rest area and see if we can stay there until the snow lets up, or until the next morning. It seems to be a good choice, as there is a restaurant here, and snow plows, and we didn't have to go far at all from the highway! It turned out OK, and we left the next morning, and we just had to put up with the plows all night, noisily scraping the parking lot to earn their money. First lesson learned: highway rest areas can be a noisy choice for a night's stop.
In the next three days we get to North Carolina, staying overnight at a state park, then South Carolina and a one-night stay at Buck Hall in Francis Marion National Forest on the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW), and finally in St. Augustine at Anastasia State Park. This park is on the ocean and we are able to walk on the beach in mild weather. There is another state park in St. Augustine, Faver-Dykes, that we stay at also. So far camping in a trailer is finding us dealing with campfire smoke but otherwise is pleasant and our campsites are lined with lush tropical foliage. We are mostly eating meals in the trailer, but we had a nice dinner out in St. Augustine.
Our next reservations are for Jonathan Dickinson State Park in Hobe Sound after one night at the locks at the east end of Lake Okeechobee in Central Florida. We made reservations back home in November and so far the choices we made have worked out well. We have friends near Hobe Sound that we are visiting while in the area, and we do our Christmas shopping and mailing of packages in the village. This is a favorite stop for us, as the ICW runs through here, the ocean beach is close and easy to access, and the village is easy to walk around.
We signed on for a boat tour up a river in the park that takes us to the Trapper Nelson compound, a 1940-60s outpost for hunting, camping and trading. The tour includes good comments on the environmental and natural features of the area. Our camping skills so far are honed by talking with the rangers, watching other campers, and by good old-fashioned trial and error. Here we also added the large decal to our trailer that we had ordered back home but didn't have time to affix until now due to weather and travel. (See it in one of our pictures.)
For Christmas we are moving to Blue Springs State Park north of Orlando. It is near to Sally and Joe Beisler who are hosting a Christmas day dinner and where our daughter and her significant other Mike (Sally's son) are staying. It was so nice to have a comfortable, friendly group to celebrate Christmas with.  With the extended Beisler family we also explored a zoo and ate at a German restaurant complete with German alpine-music entertainment.
Blue Springs is a great stop, as every day we are there are more manatees at the spring and the spring run (the connection between the spring and the St. Johns River).  The water here is crystal clear and there is a perfect boardwalk along the run. On our last day the count is 119 manatees.
We stayed at another state park in the area before moving to Haines City, near Disneyworld. We celebrated New Years Eve with Canadian boating friends who are staying there, in a fifth-wheel  travel trailer. Since then we have spent five days in the Everglades National Park and another 5 days in Naples, Florida. Highlights of those two stays are: having a Great Horned owl above us for 3 days in a tree in Haines City, canoeing in the mangroves in the Everglades, plus seeing crocodiles and alligators up-close-and-personal, and visiting with Marblehead friends in Naples.
More lessons learned, since we are newbies at this camping thing: making reservations is a good idea (weekends especially tend to be fully booked at the state parks), last minute stops can be rewarding (we went to a county park in Palm Beach County--Prince Park--and it was quite a find), bug spray is mandatory (all parks south of St. Augustine), and if we don't have a sewer connection at the campground, we don't stay too long (or we need to empty our tanks mid-week). Our experiences with our TV and antenna are not spectacular, and so far we have only found 2 Spanish channels, in the Everglades Nat. Park and none in other parks. But we enjoy listening to music in the evening and reading or playing a game or two.
Hopefully we will update this report another two times, as we plan to be gone until March 8th or so. Until next time, happy New Year!