First week in Florida

Spanish moss hangs from a tree along Lake Lochloosa, near Hawthorne on our trip south. We just stayed overnight but for future excursions, this is on our list for a longer stay.

Here it is. A post. Yes, it has been a long time.

We pulled into our place in Spring Hill, Florida just over a week ago, and we’ve had a chance to get oriented. Spring Hill is about 20 miles north of Tampa on the Sun Coast.

Our home until early January is an RV resort. It is a community of dozens of RVs mixed in with a greater number of doublewide homes of mostly retired folks. Unlike the past couple of resort stays, we are not working.

We won’t ignore the obvious, that TQN has been AWOL since the big freeze in Texas, which now seems like a long, long time ago.

Scenes from our home until January. We have a lot of room at our and some shade of live oak and pine trees. We haven't hit the pool yet, and we'll have to try the shuffleboard. Who could complain?

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Perhaps I’ll write about the Big Gap later. From April to October, we had some major family milestones, we sold our house, and I took on a job that was more physical than any I’ve had for a long time. And here's a news flash: Summer is hot in the Missouri River Valley.

For the weeks ahead, we'll soak up warm winter weather, hit the beach and some other sights as we figure out a course for 2022.

The closest we came to the Sunshine State was in 2019, when we drove from our second work camp gig along I-75 south of Atlanta, Georgia to see the sights of Macon. We probably would have made it here eventually, but our friend Audrey moved here last spring, so along with warm weather, that was all the reason we needed to drive south. A couple years ago we visited Audrey in Albuquerque, New Mexico, giving us an excuse to briefly explore the Land of Enchantment.

After we left Texas, we spent the summer working near Kansas City, and that provided the chance for a little more time with our family in the KC area and eastern Nebraska.

Our employer in Missouri also had an opportunity in Virginia, so we were able to spend October in the area just north of Yorktown, in what they call “Rivah Country.” The resort wasn’t far from the homes of my sisters, Myrna and Linda, who moved east in the 1960s from Nebraska and settled down. It was sure good to see them again.

October flashed by and it was time to head down to Florida. In both segments of our fall travels, east to Virginia and south to Florida, we tried to take our time and spend at least two nights at each stopover. We'll share some highlights from those journeys in future blogs. Our long stay in Missouri almost made us think we were settling down.

The sunshine state greeted us with two days of chilly rain, but now we’re settled, and the temperatures have climbed to the 80s in the afternoon. Our northern metabolisms are saying: Wait, isn’t this November? I sent a few snapshots of the balmy weather conditions from my phone, and strangely, people living in the chill don't think it's funny.

After we set up at our camp site, we headed west to the Gulf of Mexico, or close to it. We couldn’t help but think of last winter’s home on the Coastal Bend of Texas when we saw the Gulf, but even in first impressions there’s such a big difference. At Rockport last year we were by a bay, so the cool gulf breeze kept the temperatures down. Now, we’re a few miles inland and I’m not complaining, even if the humidity occasionally reaches 80 percent.

Something we’re learning along the coastal areas is how much of the coastal property is privately owned. We drove home through some of the older communities and crossed bridges over inlets. Anglers lined the bridges, hoping to catch some amberjack. Seafood joints were sprinkled in among the neighborhoods. But, soon enough, you were back on a highway, with one stretch of road leading from one strip mall to the next big box store, one looking very much like the other. I still haven’t found my bearings.

What has really caught my eye is the abundance of bike lanes and trails, and even sidewalks for miles along the highway corridors.

With Daylight Saving Time we're adjusting to sunset before 6 p.m. The resort has has all the things you’d expect in a place full of retired people. A swimming pool, shuffleboard, horseshoes and a communal campfire ring. So if we don't want to leave and deal with the traffic, we could just hang around here. I miss having an evening camp fire just outside my door, but I've also don't miss those calm evenings when smoke from dozens of campfires drove us indoors.

We’re parked next to a few other of the short-term residents, including a couple in their 40s, a traveling nurse, her truck driving husband and two teenagers from Virginia. When they talked about their upcoming plans to travel west, it made us think about the anticipation of adventure on the road.

Just a couple days after we arrived, Angie had a great idea to rent a pontoon at Homosassa Springs, and it was just what we needed, several hours of manatee watching, learning how to drive a boat again, and sitting on the calm gulf waters in silence interrupted only by gulls.

Doesn't Angie look like a natural in the captain's chair? We had a great time catching up with our friend Audrey. We saw dozens of manatees, including this one with a scar. Back on land, the gators struck a symmetrical pose.

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We’ll take it one day at a time. I have my eye on a part-time job, but only one that would allow me to keep feeding the blog on a regular basis. There are too many stories to share, and before you know it our time here will fly by. The notebook is full, and I don't want to get out of the routine again.

If you are new to TQN, visit us again as we make some updates and tell our story. We’ve been on the road for three years now, and while much has changed, we continue to explore and learn about the great country we call home. If you have any questions or thoughts, please send them my way at larry@thirdquarternomads.com.

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This big boy greeted us at the campground office by Lochloosa Lake. The campground owner said that alligators can be seen cruising the lake's shore for food in the mornings. This gator, he said, came from another lake nearby.