Unfortunately our first week was marred with news of the passing of Bill Meininger, a dear friend of Jay’s from his Coast Guard days at Cape May, NJ. His death was completely unexpected and cast a shroud of disbelief over our entire week’s activities. Not thinking he would need a suit on the trip, Jay flew home to retrieve one and attended the funeral in Virginia.
During the two days that Jay was away, Chris was ecstatic to discover a sewing machine in the RV park activities center. She set about creating taupe colored covers for her photo scanner and printer and the stark white TV trays to better blend them into the trailer décor. Upon his return, Jay upgraded the water system with an accumulator tank to keep the chattering of the water pump to a less discernable dull roar. We discovered that our wax-on/wax-off muscles were at an advanced state of atrophy. After washing and waxing the truck we had to take off a week to heal and decided to schedule alternating work and play days of visiting friends.
We decided to stay at an RV park in Bushnell because it is centrally located to friends who live in The Villages, Sarasota, Tavares and Dunnellon. The month was spent traversing the area to visit them all.
The Villages is a planned community of over 70,000 people, 35,000 homes and 32 golf courses, (providing enough facilities for the most popular pass-time of retirees), and is located about an hour northwest of Orlando. We visited several of our friends who live in the community and all of them say they absolutely love it. The list of activities offered each week is immense and each housing section has its own recreational center complete with swimming pool, shuffle board, lawn bowling, pickle ball and tennis courts. Shopping centers complete with movie theatres, boutique shops, restaurants and needed services abound both inside and outside the immaculately manicured community. Some call it Disneyland for old people.
Chris with her friend, Donna Evans at a lake in one of the shopping areas at The Villages.
The primary mode of transportation is golf carts that the residents use not only on the golf courses but you find them at the shopping centers inside and outside the community! These are no ordinary golf carts. Some are powered by small gasoline engines and are licensed to drive on county roads, some are powered by electricity. Carts of every shape, size and color you can imagine zip by on the specially made paved paths that run adjacent to the roads. We really got a kick out of the diversity we saw from 4-seater models with fronts like Rolls Royces to sporty little numbers styled after Chevys from the 60s.
A few samples of the types of golf carts to be found in The Villages.
Egrets are found in landscaping around the large, shopping center buildings where ponds are nearby.
In mid-February we filled larger bowls with water and food for Little Miss, loaded Max and an overnight bag into Ole Blue and headed to Sarasota, about an hour south of Tampa, to visit a high school friend of Jay’s, Darrel Wade and his wife Alberta. Sarasota is the former winter home of the Ringling Brothers circus and currently the home of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art (http://www.ringling.org/) which houses an art museum, the Ringling home, two circus museums and the Historic Asolo Theater. While visiting the city we found Max’s Dog Bakery and just had to take a photo of Max in front of it.
Max and Jay at Max's Dog Bakery in Sarasota, FL.
We then visited mutual friends from our separate boating days, Dave and Ruth Taisch, who live in Tavares. The town is situated south of Ocala National Forest amidst 5 huge, fresh water lakes. Dave and Ruth lived on a sailboat and cruised the Caribbean for several years in the early 90s. They then traded their boat in for a land yacht and travelled the U.S. until they settled in a beautiful home on Lake Harris a few years ago. We travelled across the lake in their beautiful, completely restored, 1960s vintage, 20’ inboard power boat to have lunch at a lakeside restaurant. Gator bites was a new, culinary experience for us in the form of fried, alligator tail. One might say they tasted like chicken - - the new-new white meat!!
The Taischs engage in a most unique hobby and have devoted the last two years working on a backyard project associated with it. They are creating a train garden. It covers an area at least 30’ x 30’ and, when completed, will contain four separate train tracks that wind inside, around and over each other. The trains are housed in a one-car garage size structure adjacent to the tracks and they will exit and enter the building via a small doggie door. The ties and hand-bent, 3” wide tracks rest on foundations of poured concrete. They have most of the concrete foundations in place and are beginning to position the ties and tracks. The final phase will be the landscaping. We thought it was such a unique project. We’ve seen many indoor model trains with buildings, landscaping and lighting but never one of this scale out of doors.
A week after visiting the Taisches we headed northwest to Dunnellon. Art and Edda Ross, whom Jay knew from when he was stationed in Puerto Rico, live near the Rainbow Springs State Park (http://www.floridastateparks.org/rainbowsprings/default.cfm or http://www.floridastateparks.org/rainbowsprings/docs/brochure.pdf ) which was holding a Cracker Festival. This gorgeously landscaped park is the only two-time winner of the National Gold Medal Award for State parks in the country. It contains the headwaters of the fourth largest freshwater spring in the state, producing over 400,000 gallons of spring water per day which creates the Rainbow Spring River. Paved paths, lined with azaleas and other cultivated plants, wind through the park, skirting the edges of the spring waters, passing waterfalls and open areas used for the festival and other events. Vendors at the festival sold hand woven, wool clothing, hand carved wooden bowls, and other items indicative of the Cracker era.
The Taischs engage in a most unique hobby and have devoted the last two years working on a backyard project associated with it. They are creating a train garden. It covers an area at least 30’ x 30’ and, when completed, will contain four separate train tracks that wind inside, around and over each other. The trains are housed in a one-car garage size structure adjacent to the tracks and they will exit and enter the building via a small doggie door. The ties and hand-bent, 3” wide tracks rest on foundations of poured concrete. They have most of the concrete foundations in place and are beginning to position the ties and tracks. The final phase will be the landscaping. We thought it was such a unique project. We’ve seen many indoor model trains with buildings, landscaping and lighting but never one of this scale out of doors.
A week after visiting the Taisches we headed northwest to Dunnellon. Art and Edda Ross, whom Jay knew from when he was stationed in Puerto Rico, live near the Rainbow Springs State Park (http://www.floridastateparks.org/rainbowsprings/default.cfm or http://www.floridastateparks.org/rainbowsprings/docs/brochure.pdf ) which was holding a Cracker Festival. This gorgeously landscaped park is the only two-time winner of the National Gold Medal Award for State parks in the country. It contains the headwaters of the fourth largest freshwater spring in the state, producing over 400,000 gallons of spring water per day which creates the Rainbow Spring River. Paved paths, lined with azaleas and other cultivated plants, wind through the park, skirting the edges of the spring waters, passing waterfalls and open areas used for the festival and other events. Vendors at the festival sold hand woven, wool clothing, hand carved wooden bowls, and other items indicative of the Cracker era.
Photos of the headwaters of Rainbow Springs and waterfall at Rainbow Springs State Park.
Shallow pool at headwaters of Rainbow Springs with small fish. Sandy round areas are where springwater is bubbling out of ground.
No one really knows where the term Cracker came from, but most agree that it is the term used to describe the Florida cattlemen of the 19th and early 20th centuries. They used a whip to manage their cattle and the cracking sound it made became their moniker. There are other opinions on the term as noted here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_cracker or search Google with the keywords “Florida Crackers”.
Cracker vendor who has made a chair seat out of neckties and a typical Cracker camp.
The next day we visited Webster. Now Webster is a bit of a legend in this area and only about 5 miles from our RV park. Every Tuesday afternoon, the RV park hosts a jam session where the park residents and other locals get together in the recreation building and play music. One of the songs they sing is about Webster’s Flea Market. It is held at the county fairgrounds every Monday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. and it is M-O-N-S-T-R-O-U-S!!! The two parking lots alone cover the ground of 4 football fields. The flea market consists of well over a thousand booths, under cover and in the open, with everything you can imagine from fresh produce, kettle corn stands, antiques, topless sandals, guns, auto accessories, tee shirts, ball caps, do-it-yourself satellite dish kits, and did I mention antiques – vast quantities of antiques. You name it they’ve got it and more. Having been to flea markets in the past, Chris was ready to go in a couple of hours. Not Jay!! He had never experienced anything like it and we stayed until the end and beyond. He just could not believe the expansiveness and diversity of the event.
Webster Flea Market
Jay perusing a table of World War II relics.
The pressing of humanity was a fantastic test for Max and he was just a gem. Everyone who saw him stopped to pet him, young and old alike. He was unflustered, calm, his normal good self and was alert enough to score a hot dog someone had dropped.
A little information about the area:
Bushnell is located on the western side of central Florida, which is very different from the coastal, white, sandy beaches and azure seas most people envision as Florida. Sumter Oaks RV Park is situated between a large cattle ranch and a cement mining company which is entirely obscured from our view by a forest of huge Live Oaks, dripping with Spanish moss. Large Live Oaks throughout the RV park shade our and other trailers; sometimes a little too much considering the cool temps. In keeping with our experiences so far in encountering unusual creatures, the RV park has two resident Sandhill Cranes whose squawking can be heard from one end of the park to the other. Their tameness allows us, and even Max, to get surprisingly close.
A little information about the area:
Bushnell is located on the western side of central Florida, which is very different from the coastal, white, sandy beaches and azure seas most people envision as Florida. Sumter Oaks RV Park is situated between a large cattle ranch and a cement mining company which is entirely obscured from our view by a forest of huge Live Oaks, dripping with Spanish moss. Large Live Oaks throughout the RV park shade our and other trailers; sometimes a little too much considering the cool temps. In keeping with our experiences so far in encountering unusual creatures, the RV park has two resident Sandhill Cranes whose squawking can be heard from one end of the park to the other. Their tameness allows us, and even Max, to get surprisingly close.
Cranes at the RV park.
The locals have told us that the Florida cattle industry is second in the U.S. to Texas and has become the #1 industry in the state. Orange production has declined to second place mainly due to a mold that attacks the orange groves. If an infected tree is discovered all trees within at least a 100’ radius of it are destroyed in an attempt to control the mold infestation. A larger number of oranges are imported from South America than what are currently produced in Florida.
Cows on the ranch adjacent to the RV park.
By the end of February we had settled into a comfortable, relaxed routine between work and play. We made new friends, learned many “tricks of the trade” from the “old hands” at full-time RVing, visited dear friends and, in general, enjoyed our time until it warmed up enough for us to head north in late April; but an e-mail from Chris’ son, Kevin, potentially altered the rest of our two-year Odyssey.
