20th April – 27th April 2023
We were happy campers to be back on the road proper. The sun was a’shining. Big Dave and TinCan were reunited. Indicators were functioning and left turns were again possible without compunction. The 35-45 mph wobble had resolved and although the traffic through North Orlando to get to Highway 95 was hideous it couldn’t dampen our spirits. We eventually hit the open road and headed north-west up towards the Atlantic coast. We were off to the beach!
The state of Florida is filling up fast. Many folk are looking for one, or a combination of, its warmer winters, lower taxes and less liberal politics. The Snow Birds come for the winter season. Lots of people are coming to live full-time and choose to endure the hot and humid summers. Homes are being built at a frantic rate, prices are going up and its the only place in the US where we have experienced the traffic as bad as LA. However the crowds seem to congregate in southern Florida and the further north we drove the more relaxed it all felt.
After a busy week of doing naff all we had decided that were going to have a week of relaxation on the coast near a town called St Augustine. This is the oldest city in the USA having been settled by the Spanish in the real olden days of 1565. It was the capital of Spanish Florida for about 200 years then was the designated capital of British East Florida in 1763. It returned to the Spanish in 1783 who ceded Florida to the United States in 1819 when it was the Floridian capital again from 1821 to 1824 when the title was transfered to Tallahassee. It has some beautiful old buildings, churches and a fort and a definite Spanish flavour. It also boasts the first catholic mission on US soil from 1565, Mission Nombre de Dios, and the site is commemorated with a 204ft metal cross.
Our camp was only a few streets back from the beach, less than half a mile from the supermarket and several bars and restaurants and was an ‘easy’ 8 mile cycle to town. (I put ‘easy’ into inverted commas as there was a dedicated cycle lane all the way there with only a very slight elevation change, but we haven’t cycled for a while and the ol’ undercarriages have tenderised since last summer. We were to suffer some saddle soreness). The camp was an ‘RV resort’. This generally means that the place has great facilities, a pool and but is priced accordingly. We were going to have to pay Florida holiday prices if we wanted to behave like we were on holiday in Florida. Which we did. We spent time by the pool every day, further converting our skin from the shade ‘English Winter Alabaster’ to a well recognised Northern European shade- ‘A-bit-red-now-but-will-be-Light-Brown-in-the-morning’.
Depite the temperature ranging from hot to very hot there was a lovely on-shore sea breeze and we tried to combine a visit to the beach with a power walk most mornings that we didn’t cycle. Some exercise was well overdue! The Atlantic itself didn’t look that inviting yet – cold and messy conditions – so most people were either walking, cycling, fishing or sitting and gazing with only a few hardy souls paddling. Even the multitude of dogs didn’t really want to go in.
Our first full day here was a sorting day. At one point it looked like we were having a fire sale with bags, tools, boxes, electonics, leads, chairs, bikes, BBQ, and all sorts of other guff spilled out all over our concrete pad. We unpacked our bags, repacked our warm stuf and put it away. I packed away the duvet – won’t be needing that for a while. We re-aquainted ourselves with all the things that we own here, which is a suprising amount of stuff. There are lots of half-used bottles and tubes of stuff, tools and equipment that remind us of all the repairs and maintanance that we have done along our travels. Like the tyre iron that we bought in Arizona after one of our rear wheels came loose and nearly fell off in the desert. Fun times, happy memories…. Eventually we made some sense of the place and all was tidied away again, with a satisfying bag of rubbish to be disposed of.
Our first foray to town was by an intriguing ride-share/on-demand trolley bus. I had found the number on a flyer pinned up by the toilets (One has to be careful in these circumstance as to what one is getting into, so to speak). The RV resort reception staff denied all knowledge of the service and when I called the number I was given the direct dial number for the driver of the bus. I was to call him for a pick up after 4pm. It all seemed quite unusual. At 4pm I got through to Lloyd, the driver, who due to a combination of background noise, my accent and trying to navigate a big bus through traffic, took a while to understand my request for a pick up. We got there in the end though and a time was set: 6pm. Were we going to The Amphitheatre? No, Historic Down Town, I said. Would he show?? At 5.45pm we headed to the pick up area at the resort entrance, all washed and dressed and there he was, waiting in old noisy bus disguised as a trolley. We settled into the uncomfortable wooden seating, another couple jumped on the bus on a whim and we were off! On the way we picked up a few more couples from a hotel and it transpired that there was a big concert on at the Ampitheatre, a 4000 seater local concert venue. The performer for the next three nights was ‘Billy Strings’ (no-us neither), but next week it was hosting Billy Idol and Pat Benatar (on consecutive nights, not in a bizzare fantasy genre chimera duet performance). He dropped them off there and us to town. “Just call when you want picking up’, Lloyd said as we disembarked, “but it will have to be at 9pm at the latest so that I can drop you off home before the concert finishes”. This seemed a bit vague so we asked him to pick us up where we were getting off at 9pm. A firm plan without needing a phone call seemed a better option. He agreed. But what do they say about the best laid plans…..
We had a lovely few hours in town. We wandered through the town square lined with tall trees draped in Spanish moss, through the old narrow historic streets, past the grand churches, the clock tower, and old Spanish colonial hotel building that is now a university (none of which we took any photos of) and then after a much needed cold beer in a local microbrewery we had dinner in a great restaurant called The Floridian. It was off the touristy beaten track but good enough to have a constant queue of people waiting for a table. The food was great, the service excellent, the drinks cold. What more could we ask for? Well I’ll tell you… ‘people watching’ opportunities. We had managed to score one of the best seats in the house on the veranda giving us a prime vantage point to observe the natives. It really was a perfect restaurant experience.
We walked back to the pick up point for the bus in plenty of time but by 9.10pm he still hadn’t turned up. We called him multiple times and after not answering the first few calls he eventually picked up and said he wasn’t coming. He was now on the wrong side of the bridge and it was now too late to fetch us before the concert ended. We were stuck 8 miles from home with no public transport and 4000 people leaving a concert in 30 minutes time. Time to pray to the Gods of Uber…. 2 minutes later our angel in a Honda Accord arrived. She was not the most joyful individual in the firmament. During the entirety of our ride she drove with one hand whilst the other shovelled a constant supply of nuts into her mouth whilst complaining about her lack of rides that evening, bills she had to pay and the fact she couldn’t afford to eat. (She was quite a large lady so I think that the lack of food situation must have been fairly recent.) We tried to cheer her up and engage her in conversation between mouthfuls, but to no avail. As she dropped us off we reassured her that her night was going to get better very fast if she hung around the Amphitheatre and she went on her sullen way. Not all angels wear smiles.
The next day was undercarriage ruination day. On a Saturday morning the Amphitheatre hosts a weekly Farmers Market and although we had no desire to buy armfuls of vegetables or useless arty knick knacks we knew that there would be a food truck or two that could serve us something tasty for brunch. It was 30 minutes to the market along the old beach boulevard with the aforementioned cycle lane. Very civilised. We called in at the lighthouse to take a picture as it was very handsome with its fresh black and white paint job, and arrived at the market with a healthy hunger and the beginnings of ‘seat fatigue’. This was forgotten with a wander around the stalls, a remarkably good cup of coffee and a very tasty, albeit very slowly prepared, breakfast sandwich. Whilst waiting for our sandwich to be readied a lady of a certain age and demenour walked up to the hatch the food truck and said this verbatim: “Is there onion in the egg salad? No, good. I’ll have the egg salad sandwich but without the bread”. So she was really after a bowl of egg mayonaise… We ate our sandwiches whilst listening to a local country/bluegrass band play some tunes and sing some songs. They were mostly ok but a lady took vocals for one track and nearly made our ears bleed.
We continued our journey to town, over the bridge which had a scary metal grate in the middle drawbridge bit, and tied up the bikes on the waterfront. By now it was a’sizzling and Mr Hampson needed a new shady hat. First stop: the Panama Hat Co. shop. Here there were walls and walls of multiple types of hat and a multitude of hot sweaty tourists trying to buy them. We joined the throngs. He found a very fine hat, offered in a size sufficient to accommodate his gargantuan intellect which was happily not an original Panama. The difference in price was equivalent to our spends in the Floridian the previous evening. Suitably attired we spent an hour or so wandering around the streets, looking at the fort from the outside and then walked back along the waterfront to the bikes. The ride home was hot and painful. Them seat bones…..
The next day we gingerly cycled the short distance up to a nearby mini golf course for the first round of the highly competitive ‘2023 Tour’. Despite Nick’s early glory with a hole-in-one on the first hole, and much to his dismay, I won by one stroke. He had the yips on the back 9.
A day’s rest out of the saddle saw our nethers recovered enough for a ride out up to Anastasia State Park. This is a small park in the same area as the Ampitheatre with a campsite (sadly fully booked otherwise we would have stayed here) and a large swathe of protected beach. We packed a picnic lunch and cruised on up there. We ate our sandwiches on the beach, gazing at the sea which was still pretty rough and unfriendly looking. Beautiful though.
We met one interesting chap in camp. A chatty Irish man in his mid 50s who had moved here at 20 years old. He had a peculiar Southern drawl with irish inflections. Within 5 minutes of talking to him he had divulged that he had been a bounty hunter and then a power linesman until he suffered a high tension electric shock that had nearly killed him. He had shown us his burn scars that went up the back of both legs and the scar across his mid-chest that he had covered with a tattoo of an image of …his own heart…He had told us about his 12 heart attacks and that he had recently had a big heart operation where the heart was taken out of his chest for some service and repairs whilst he was on a bypass machine and that the surgeon had carefully stitched his chest wound up so that his heart tattoo was lined up again. Now he was a dog trainer and lived full time in his trailer on the park with his wife, who was also a dog trainer, and a very handsome German Shepherd called Zeus, who was, predictably, very well trained. We heard about his kids and grandkids, his lack of family in Ireland, his family in UK and the fact that he had duel citizenship of both countries so that if he wanted to get American citizenship he would have to renounce one of them. Five minutes, I tell you. He barely drew breath. Nice bloke though.
We had a few more beach walks over the last few days and on our last evening we strolled to a very close local bar for a beer and our first burger. (My father thinks that this is ALL we do when we are here-Not true, Dad!). The evening was warm, there was a light breeze, fairly decent live music playing on the deck, good beer, a good burger and a nice couple that we got chatting to at the bar. A great finale to our first stop on our route.
The next morning we packed up and headed to our next stop. A swamp in Georgia.
Good to hear you are back up and running!