Big Dave Rolls Again. Trip No.5 starts back in Florida

12th April – 20th April 2023

A whole year has passed since we put Big Dave and Tin Can to bed in a storage unit in Orlando, Florida and returned to the UK. It has been a year of catching up with friends and family, a year of living a reasonably conventional life in a house, and a year of wondering what our short-to-medium term future looked like. After a month of tent camping in France in the Summer of 2022 we realised that our future is definitely on the road, but not under canvas. We are committed to one last big trip in the USA and have decided to become full-time nomads in Europe and the UK for a few years after that. To that end we are selling our house, have packed our possessions into a storage container, have sold our car, have put a deposit on a motorhome to be ready later in the year and we are now back Stateside.

This trip, like most of the previous ones, started with a degree of uncertainty. What state would Big Dave and Tin Can be in after 12 months idle? This was the first time we had stored them ‘under cover’ rather than inside and we knew that at least two hurricaines had passed over Orlando in the time we had been away. Last time Big Dave wouldn’t start and we had begun that trip with a low-loader ride to the garage, a 3 week delay and many thousands of dollars in repair bills. Nervous times ahead.

We headed to the storage unit in an Uber after a night in a hotel in Orlando. Mid- April is already hot,hot, hot here. We had left behind an unseasonably cool UK Spring and it was lovely to feel the heat again. The lilly white flesh would need some rays to tone down the glare.

First impressions revealed them to be filthy, covered in dust from the past storms but in one piece. Big Dave started first time without a cough or a splutter, the trickle charger having done its job. We opened up Tin Can and apart from most of the pictures having fallen off their 3M fixings with the heat, all seemed well inside too. So far, so good! The first few days of our trip were to be visiting friends in Sarasota so we unpacked and repacked our bags for that and embarked on our first ‘off-load’ of Tin Can. He was staying here as the start of our trip proper would bring us back this way and we had another week left on our storage rental. Big Dave needed an oil change – a very easy task without TC, tricky with him due to his height.

We headed off, procured an oil change – which was nearly a transmission fluid change due to an error by our mechanic that was caught just in time – and drove to Sarasota. The 2 hour journey took 4 hours, which seemed to be purely due to the weight of traffic. En route we realised that Big Dave’s left indicator lights weren’t working. This was going to need attention.

Our hosts in Sarasota were Ed & Karee, the couple that we had met on the ranch in Arizona during our last trip. Karee was away so Ed was hosting us solo. It started in true Ed fashion… He has a regular weekly date with a group of buddies at a local establishment for drinks and an early dinner and we were invited. The venue? ‘Hooters‘, of course! We had a 5 minute turn around after arriving and within fifteen minutes had beers in hand, delivered by a very perky lil’ thing clad in small T-shirt and even smaller orange hot pants. Up until now we had not frequented a Hooters on our travels and I think both of us thought that it would be a bit seedy and frequented purely by groups of lecherous men. That may be the case for many franchises, but this one was delightful! The clientèle was very diverse including grandparents and grandkids and the girls were all lovely, especially to the women. The company -Ed’s friends Ron & Mario- was good, the food was tasty, the service attentive and the beer cold. What’s not to love?!

We had only planned to stay in Sarasota for a long weekend, but Big Dave’s indicators needed fixing. Ed knew a guy who ran a garage and he fitted us in the next day to look at the problem. The indicators required a new relay which needed ordering. There was also a light fitting that needed replacing on one of the flared rear wheel arches. In the end we were with Ed for a week as the truck took longer to fix than planned (due to a part being wrong when it arrived so needing to be re-ordered.) It was a very pleasant week of maroonment after the craziness of the past month. We were happy and well behaved house guests. We cooked a few meals in, had a few meals out – including an evening over at Ed’s mum’s with take away fried chicken – started to do some onward bookings for our trip and spent some very happy hours by the pool. We even did some wildlife rescue of a red eared turtle out of the deep end. It wasn’t entirely happy about being scooped out in a leaf net, but I’m sure felt better in the nearby pond than the salt chlorinated water of the pool.

At the weekend, when Ed wasn’t working, we had a couple of outings. For the first, on Saturday afternoon, we drove the 1 hour up to St Petersberg, near Tampa, to accompany Ed to an LSU ( Louisianna State University) Alumni Crawfish Boil. Ed is an LSU alumni, a big fan of of all things LSU and a massive fan of a boil up. We met his friends, Lou and Barrie, but really it was all about the crawfish. This was served as a massive tray of the bugs, boiled in a delicious red spicy sauce that gets round your face, all over your hands, down your arms and everywhere else besides. Our verdict after this our second boil up? Very tasty, a lot of work for minimal food reward and I shouldn’t have worn white trousers.

Our other noteable outing was on Sunday afternoon to watch a waterskiing show. I thought this sort of thing had been lost to the past, but no! A club called Ski-A-Rees (No idea why it’s called this. Google had no info either) stage a weekly free show to show off their skills. They put on bigger shows once a month or so and compete nationwide too. It was good old fashioned fun with the crowds sitting on aluminium bleachers, a compère giving us a run down of the performers and a steady parade of club members of all ages doing jetty starts on fat skis, twirling on one leg, going backwards and forwards, riding on each others shoulders, doing acrobatics, doing jumps and yes, doing that thing only every seen in retro posters of 50s waterskiing…building a waterskier pyramid! It was fantastic. I would have failed to even do a jetty start, so I was very impressed. The ‘free’ show ended with the donations bucket being passed around, but it was definitly worth the cash we threw in.

Finally the car was ready and before the next Hooter’s rendezvous came around, we were off back to Orlando. The indicatiors all worked now and we could finally turn left without fear. We arrived, we reloaded TC and set off North up the coast to our first camping destination.