First Few Photos From Florida - January 2, 2015

How about that title for alliteration? We have been settling into our site at Thousand Trails Orlando and I would like to share a few pictures from our first month and a half here.

We decided on minimalist decorations this year!

We do have a few other favorite things inside the rig including our Card Rack which hangs on the wall and holds all the greeting cards we received from so many of you reading this.

Let's get right to the wildlife...

Sandhill Cranes are resident in the park and wander all around in their quest for food.  Here and below they are gathering the fallout from our songbird feeder.

Closeup of the Sandhill Crane.

Sandhill Cranes may reach the age of seven before breeding. They mate for life—which can mean two decades or more—and stay with their mates year-round. Juveniles stick close by their parents for 9 or 10 months after hatching.

Below is the Gopher Tortoise which is a long-lived reptile  that occupies upland habitat throughout Florida including forests, pastures, and yards. They dig deep burrows for shelter and forage on low-growing plants. Gopher tortoises share these burrows with more than 350 other species, and are therefore referred to as a keystone species. This one's burrow is just behind the next door neighbor's site.

Gopher Tortoises eat mostly grasses and leaves.

After this picture was taken this one ambled over to our flowers and gobbled a fallen hibiscus bloom while I watched!

The Park Staff have the burrows marked throughout the property with these little fences. Burrows can be 6 feet deep and extend 15 feet or more.

While walking Dixie one morning I heard the roar of the gas heater of a hot air balloon very close by.  I located it and thought it was coming down so I grabbed the camera and got these pictures as it landed very near us.

This picture of the brightly colored fabric through a stand of long needle pine trees almost looks like a blaze of fire.

I never did find out why it landed on the Park property. There is a Balloon Ride attraction near Disney World and we often see them passing overhead as we are only a few miles from the Mouse House! On occasion the operators dip low over us and the locals chat with the passengers overhead!

There seems to always be something blooming here and this is striking on the drive into the campground proper.

Our more modest "landscaping" is shown below.

This little planting area at the front of our site was in pretty sad shape when we arrived. A neighbor across the street offered to remove 3 shrubs that seemed to us hopeless causes, but she wants to try and revive them. With a little help from the internet and a friendly clerk at Lowe's, we selected the perennials shown here. Our little gnome, who has been with us our entire time traveling has a place of honor in the front. He has been repainted twice by our daughter, Laura, and looks pretty spiffy. 

The taller green bush to the rear is Hibiscus and we have fed it so we are hoping it will produce more blooms. We are not sure what the dry stick looking thing to the right rear is, but the neighbor says it will have purple flowers in the Spring. Someday I will take pictures of the individual flowers and post them.

And speaking of Daughter, Laura, here is some of the Christmas Goodies package she sent. She never ceases to amaze with her creative talents. Nor have I ever eaten prettier cookies!

That is all for now.  Stay tuned for more when the notion strikes me.

Some Pictures from Hershey 2014

I am a little behind in keeping this blog up to date, but I have an excuse. We have been busy getting ready to split our time between PA and FL. We have been moving stuff into the Fifth Wheel in Hershey and getting ready to drive the Motorhome to Florida for winter and beyond.

We have been in Florida about a month now and are pretty well settled in our parking space at Thousand Trails Orlando. We have our Christmas decorations up in a minimalist sort of way as we have cut back on our display.

Cathy and I celebrated our 44th Wedding Anniversary yesterday. We enjoyed dinner of Salmon Florentine with tossed salad and Fre Non-Alcoholic White Zinfandel. Dessert was Toasted Coconut Cream Pie.

We have been well although Cathy spent a few hours in the Emergency Room in Clermont last week. She had stumbled getting into bed from a bathroom trip, landing hard on her butt and bumping her head. On the next day she began to have some low back pains that persisted and wakened her at 3:00 AM. The Rescue Squad helped her into the ambulance because there is no way to get their big gurney into our little space. X-Rays and a CAT Scan were largely negative but did show some narrowing of the intervertebral spaces in the area of her old spinal fusion surgery. The surgical implants were secure and no fractures were seen. A couple of days later and she was pain free and remains so today!    

I will add some pictures here from Hershey although I confess to not taking a single photo on the drive through the Shenandoah Valley to Tennessee and on through Atlanta to here! The foliage in the mountains was disappointing this year.

The trees in the parking lot at Thousand Trails Hershey were very nice.

These waterfront trees are two of four which are always beautiful, but the others had not yet turned.

This was directly across the road from our spot.

There seemed to be many more Canadian Geese this year than in years past.

We watched this wild mushroom and several others nearby grow just outside our window.

Kendalyn modeling some new school clothes. 

Kendie's Halloween Costume was  My Little Pony

Here are her Wings and Tail

This year Kendalyn volunteered to help with the Preserve's Annual Haunted Trail activity. She dressed in dark clothes and hid along the trail to jump out and scare people who paid good money just to be scared in that manner! She was given supper each evening and free admission to the park and parking for her efforts.

We take the Family Photos at Hershey annually. Here is 2014's Edition!

Laura and Kendalyn

And Randy.

This was taken during Randy's Annual Fishing Trip to Butterfield Lake in New York in September.

Greetings from Orlando Florida

Below is a copy of our Christmas Letter which has been mailed to many, but not all of you. It will update anyone who has not heard of our plans and it also relates our travels this past year.  At the end are just a couple of photos I took from our patio.

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It is hard to believe another year has passed since we last wrote our year-end letter, but it has and so here we go!  Big changes for us were made during the year and many of you know of them. I will hold that for later. First I want to recap our travels and experiences for  the end of 2013 and into 2014.

Since 2014 would be the year we needed to be in South Dakota to renew our driver licenses, and we would  have to be there before our birthdays in the month of June, we decided to spend the winter months in Texas to put us in the approximate Longitude but still be able to avoid the cold weather. Our travels for the year would cover 7,500 miles.

We enjoy driving in the autumn through the Shenandoah Valley along Interstate 81 as the fall colors are usually still vibrant in November and this year was very pretty. Over the years of travel and on this route we have established several regular stops at convenient intervals and we used them before stopping for a few days in Tennessee at the Escapees RV Park there. Our route to Texas from there included stops in Chattanooga TN, Gadsden and Tuscaloosa AL, Hattiesburg MS, Baton Rouge and Lafayette LA and Beaumont TX before getting to another Escapees Park in Livingston TX.

Leaving there on November 25, we traveled to several Thousand Trails Preserves around the Houston area and then to Port O'Connor on the Gulf Coast where we spent 6 weeks trying to stay warm and enjoying locally caught shrimp. Port O'Connor calls itself "The End of the Road" and it truly is as far as one can go before running into the Gulf. Leaving there March 3rd we utilized our membership in Thousand Trails and stayed in the system until April 9th. Our stops were for one or two weeks at each of 5 Preserves more or less surrounding Houston. Wildlife is abundant in most of the parks which we enjoy. Our stop at Lake Medina afforded us time to visit Cathy's brother, Bob and his family, who live in the San Antonio suburbs. We enjoyed some local BBQ and Pizza and took a day trip to visit Cathy's cousins, the Bogarts, in Kerrville, which is about an hour drive.

Now heading north our first stop was in Norman Oklahoma at beautiful Lake Thunderbird State Park where we planned to stay for 3 weeks, and it is a good thing we did! One morning while doing nothing more than reading or watching the news, Larry had a frightening experience. In an instant the sight in his right eye was gone. It was as though he was looking through a snow globe filled with dark particles. A hurried call to an ophthalmologist in Norman resulted in a visit to the office where the local doctor determined that I needed to see a retina specialist who as luck would have it was on his regular visit to the local office. Long story short, I had suffered a torn retina and required surgery. The surgery was done in Oklahoma City on a Friday, very early in the morning and we had a followup on Saturday morning. The surgery stitched the tear in the retina and included a vitrectomy to replace all the gunky fluid in my eye with fresh saline solution. A bubble of air is intentionally inserted as well to apply gentle pressure to keep the retina pressed against the optic nerve while healing. 

We arrrived in South Dakota in time to get our licenses renewed and passed the vision exam easily. The surgeon in OK had me see a colleague of his in SD for a followup appointment and healing was well along. Our plans then took us on a 3 week jaunt across Minnesota with stops in the prairie southwest part of the state to places only a stone's throw from the Canadian Border and ultimately to a stop in Duluth on Lake Superior. From there we took day trips to the northeastern extremes of the state and enjoyed visiting Wolf and Bear Preserves in the village of Ely. We had to adjust our schedule a couple of times while in MN as a persistent rain threatened floods where we were supposed to be. But to our good fortune the rains made our stop in Big Falls memorable as the water was extremely high and fast. Locals told us it is rarely as boistrous as we witnessed as we were parked for the night at the City Park alongside the Falls.

We then drove to Wisconsin to visit Cathy's dear friend Diana Sullivan and her family over the 4th of July period. We enjoyed picnics at the campground lake and other gatherings with them. We then took six weeks driving from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania taking advantage of our Thousand Trails membership with week long stays at 4 campgrounds in Indiana and Ohio before reaching the Pittsburgh suburbs. We stayed 3 weeks there visiting Larry's family and to attend his 55th High School Reunion. Sadly one of the organizers succumbed to a long fight with cancer just hours before the Reunion so it put a somber note on the evening. And we recently received word that another classmate who attended the get-together has passed away also from cancer. Too many of us are leaving too soon.

After we said our goodbyes in Western Pa, we drove to Hershey to begin setting up our "Summer Home" in the form of a Keystone Montana Fifth Wheel RV. It was delivered and parked by the dealer and we were granted permission from the manager of the Thousand Trails Hershey Preserve to park our motor home in the adjacent site so we could easily transfer some of our summer things to the Montana.

From there we drove the familiar route to Florida via Interstate 81 to Knoxville TN and then Interstate 59 to Florida where we are parked in our "Winter Quarters" at the Thousand Trails Orlando Preserve. As most of you already know we have decided to settle down and curtail our travel as the effort to pack up and go has become too much to do for both of us. So we will commute between here and Hershey as the seasons change from winter to summer and back again.

We hope everybody has a great holiday season with all the joys imaginable.  For those of you who do not receive my email blog announcements and are interested in reading more about our travels including  photos, go to http://travelswithcathylarry.blogspot.com/

to view the posts since 2011. And there is one other item to note, our mail forwarding service in Sioux Falls moved to a larger facility and it has necessitated that we change our mailing address. So please note our new, permanent address: I will be a little cryptic here so the internet demons don't deluge our postal mail with offers too good to be true!

Our new street address is 3916 N. Potsdam Ave. 2501

and our new Zip Code is 57104.
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Thousand Trails Orlando

Each spot here has a bit of a planting area at the front entrance. Ours is a little sad looking and needs some TLC soon.  There is a Tropical Hyacinth that is in need of fertilizer and some pruning, but it is valiantly trying to bloom as you can see. We think we will remove some small evergreen shrubs which seem to be mostly dead and replace them with heat resistant perrenials and use the Hyacinth as a backdrop.

These blossoms just came out today, December 6, 2014.

You can see the yellow leaves and sparse foliage from lack of fertilizer.

Merry Christmas to All from Larry and Cathy

Blazing Skies and Pretty Wild Flowers

As this is written, we are parked in Western Pennsylvania where we have been for about two weeks. Our travel from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania has been over previously visited familiar places and very few photos were taken as we mostly relaxed when we were not dodging thunderstorms.

We arrived at Mountain Top Campground in Tarentum PA which is about 18 miles from Leechburg where Larry grew up and where he still has family.  So we have been doing some visiting and will include some pictures.

Mountain Top is a rather interesting place as it is the site of the spoils pile from a former coal strip mine operation in the area. The overburden that was removed to expose the coal was piled here. When mining was finished the pile was leveled leaving a large flat-topped "mountain" upon which the campground was established. Former owners were Blue Grass Music enthusiasts and held regular festivals here attracted large crowds. Sadly one of the owners passed away 2 years ago and his wife finally sold to new, younger owners. It is unknown if they will continue the concerts.

At any rate the elevated location has afforded us some lovely and vibrant sunsets which I have tried to capture for your enjoyment. I realize the photos do not do justice to the vastness of some of these backlit cloud formations, but here they are!

I don't have words to add to these so they will stand on their own.

We had an opportunity to visit with Larry's Aunt Betty Knell who in turn was being visited by her daughter and grandchildren from England. My Uncle Walter Knell died in April of this year at age 85 after a long illness, so it was our first chance to see Betty since. It is a strange feeling conversing with one's cousin who speaks with a distinct British accent though she was born here in Pennsylvania. Amanda (Mandy) moved to England quite a while ago and has developed the speech of her new country. Her children, twins Annabelle and Jack, having been born in England know no other speech. We were reminded that Jack is senior to Annabelle by one minute.

Jack and Annabelle Baggaley

Annabelle and Jack with their Grandmother, Betty Knell

Mandy and her children and her Mother.

The great variety of wildflowers around the edges of the campground were an unexpected treat from our stay here. They have given me an opportunity to practice my macrophotography, and believe me I need practice. I cannot identify them all, but I offer the photos for your enjoyment.

I got a bonus with the Bee doing his work on this one.

This is the ubiquitous Goldenrod.

These are tiny, perhaps an inch wide.

The two above are Thistle in bloom.

Each of these clusters above  is only about a quarter of an inch across!

We purchased a new piece of lawn art to put around our site. A fellow camper in Batesville Ohio makes these from a section of PVC pipe. And since we are heading to Florida we thought it would be right at home.

We had it displayed while parked near Ashtabula Ohio and one morning I noticed something had been added to it! When I went out to investigate I discovered that someone had left the little hand-carved egret shown below sitting on the PVC versions's back.

And finally I have to include a couple of recent pictures of Dixie being herself!  

I call this one, Princess Dixie as she reclines on a pillow on top of the sofa.

Yummie!

That is all for this time.

Update From Indiana

As we are preparing to move on to the Cincinnati OH area, I will take a few minutes to catch up on our comings and goings as well as make the big announcement alluded to in the last post!

We spent two weeks visiting Cathy's very best friend Diana Sullivan and her family in the Milwaukee WI area. We stayed at Lake Lenwood Beach and Campground about 20 miles north of Diana's home in Mequon. We have stayed at this park the various times we have stopped to see Diana.

All of her children and their families came to visit us and to take advantage of the beach at the rather tiny Lake Lenwood. Aside from voracious mosquitos which would not take a break from their attacks, we had an enjoyable time.

Here are the BFFs at our dinner table soon after our arrival.

On an earlier visit to this area Diana and Cathy had enjoyed lunch in Cedarburg, a historic town, which caters to tourists with many shops and restaurants. We were too late to get served at The Cream & Crepe Cafe but did enjoy a nice lunch at The Stilt House where they make great Tenderloin Sliders on Pretzel Rolls!

Spillway on Cedar Creek near Cream & Crepe Cafe

 On one of the days we were to be together a trip to Naperville IL was planned so Cathy and Diana's gang could visit Diana's sister, Sissy and her son Barry.  Larry had opted not to go. As the day neared, Cathy was stricken with a bladder infection, saw a doctor the day before the Naperville trip and was not able to go either.  During that journey, Diana managed to take a tumble breaking her left wrist and a finger on the right hand. She also had some bruised ribs.  After she returned home, and just before we were to leave we went to Diana's for lunch and took this photo on her back deck which overlooks a small lake.

On the deck in Mequon after Diana's fall.

Our first stop was at one of the Thousand Trails

Preserves in Clinton IN about 25 miles north of Terre Haute where we stayed a little over a week. Since we had been there several times before we did not do any touring but rather spent our time relaxing, reading, trike riding and walking Dixie. We did lots of that since our site was underneath tall trees and it was not possible to set up the satellite dish for TV.

Nevertheless it is a pretty place that has become well populated by annual site holders making those sites unavailable to the traveling members. Many have landscaped, added storage units and, as our next door neighbor put it, "...were Homesteading" the place.

Evening from our vantage point at Horseshoe Lake IN

The only unusual bird we saw was a Red-headed Woodpecker

OK. Here is the big announcement. We have decided to hang up the keys after this trip and establish seasonal residences in the Thousand Trails Preserves in Orlando FL and Hershey PA. The effort of packing and unpacking between stops has become more difficult and is not enjoyable. Our plan is to drive the motorhome to Orlando and park it there for Winter use. So that will be our final RV trip in what has been our home for nearly 11-years.

To accommodate a Summer "home" in Hershey we have purchased a used Fifth Wheel RV from a dealer in Harrisburg. We had our son, Randy, visit the dealership and inspect the rig and give his opinion. He took many photos and it all looks good. The dealer will take care of inspecting all the appliances (furnace, water heater, air conditioner, refrigerator, stove/oven, and microwave) as well as the mechanicals of the unit and assure us all will be in working order when we take delivery in October.

The Kitchen on left and table/chairs to right

For Cathy's Bookie work there is an official desk. There is a nice TV and an electric fireplace too.

One of two sofa beds is shown. We plan to keep it and replace the other with a pair of recliners.

It is a Keystone Montana which is a very popular brand we see everywhere we go and we think it will serve our needs while in PA during the Spring and Summer months.