Saturday we headed south from Hattiesburg toward Mobile Alabama. We stopped in Mobile to visit the USS Alabama, a retired WW II battleship, now a national monument...
Unfortunately it was just too darn hot to enjoy it. As we got out of the car in the parking lot, Kris commented that she hoped our tires didn't melt on the pavement while we were touring the ship. We paid the tour price and walked up the plank to the ship. It was so hot on the deck that it was just not enjoyable. We went inside to view a video on the history of the ship, however, it was a rather poor quality video and to top it off there was a young mother who had decided that the dark theater might be a good place to take her crying baby... not so much. It's hard to blame the young mom for trying to find some solace but the wailing baby really made it impossible to hear the dialogue of the video. We just left. On the way out, after leaving the ship, we went into the airplane museum where it was air conditioned... some really cool (no pun intended) planes in that place...
Later on the way to our night's stopover (KOA in Lillian, Alabama) we had lunch in a roadside diner in southern Alabama... here we tried Seafood Gumbo (not bad, only a bit spicy), Gator Bites (tastes sort of like chicken, or maybe pork), and Hushpuppies (deep fried corn meal).
Sunday morning we got up early since we planned to meet up with James and Melissa as they headed home, to Houston, from their honeymoon. They had a long day ahead of them (10-11 hour drive!) so we agreed to meet reasonably early in Destin for a coffee. We drove along the coastal highway 98 and the drive into Florida and Destin took almost a couple of hours through stop and go traffic. We got to the coffee shop about 10 minutes before the planned time; James and Melissa arrived minutes later. We sat and had a nice chat for awhile before it was time for them to head off.
We decided to stay in Destin a few days and after trying one nice looking RV Park where we got rejected due to the wee trailer being "too short" (didn't meet the 20' threshold), we settled on Camping on the Gulf even though our spot cost close to $100 (a new high for us). We settled on a nice shady spot a bit up from the beach but close to the bath house and pool. In this place, you can rent an RV spot backing onto the beautiful white sand beach but those spots are made for the biggie RVs. The spots are narrow with no shade and quite a ways from the bath house. At just under $200 they are also a tad on the expensive side; and to boot, they don't even have a sewer hookup (not that we would need one, but...) AND the park folks charge an additional $10 to come with a sucker tank truck to empty your holding tank. Oh well, not for us to worry about.
This is actually a very nice park, nice pool, good individual bathrooms in the bath houses and the beach, well how nice can you get!!!... we headed down to the pure white sand beach and had a great time bobbing around in the gentle surf and luke warm crystal waters. It wasn't until the next morning that we found that there was actually a jelly fish warning out SO BE CAREFUL... sort of puts a bit of a spoil on things and we were a lot more tentative when we went in the water that day (and we took a bottle of vinegar with us so, in the event of a jelly fish encounter, we might be able to avoid having strangers come over and pee on us!). Oh well, still extremely nice and the excellent pool was definitely jelly fish free!
We stayed in Destin 3 nights. Each afternoon we went off to find a place to sit by the beach and enjoy a glass of wine and some munchies. The best viewing spot we found was the outside bar at the Crab Trap right on the shore.
One afternoon we drove down to the Harbour Walk at Fort Walton, a bit west of Destin. Walking along the boardwalk, looking at the fishing and tour boats, we came across a large fish head sticking out of a plastic bin...
Needless to say, it drew a fair amount of attention from passersby!
Our last evening in Destin we drew up the plans for "baseball in Florida". We decided to see the Marlins host the Mets on Mother's Day and bought the tickets. That meant we had 4 days to get to Miami. Piece of cake for anybody that likes to put in many miles in a day but we broke up the drive into 4 easy days and ended this week with a night in each of Perry, Clermont, and Clewiston and will head into Miami on Saturday to start off next week.
Avoiding Interstates and Toll roads, we followed highway 98 along the coast of the panhandle then took highway 27 down through the center of the state. Perry is a bit of a hard case place; it was once a major stop on the highway from Tallahassee to Tampa, but the freeways put a stop to that. The main drag has numerous motels which look like they have simply been abandoned; no fencing, boarded up windows or anything, just busted in doors, broken windows and neglected yards. The KOA there is apparently up for sale, a fellow we met in the pool told us that at one time the KOA was valued at over $1.8 million but they now have it up for sale and hope to get in the $300,000 range at best. It looks like it was once a real nice property but it appears that lack of business is starting to show.
Clermont is just outside Orlando. We stayed at an RV park that is a strata title property. We asked to be situated near the restroom but ended up several rows away even though there were empty spots right beside the bath house. We think the park owners place overnighters in spots that have yet to be sold so that they don't have to pay anything to the other spot owners and that's why we were placed where we were. They have a nice pool though and we met a couple from New Hampshire (recently moved to Ocala, just north of here) who gave us all sorts of good suggestions about driving down to Key West.
South of Clermont we drove past enormous orange groves and saw many, many huge transport trucks hauling full loads of oranges (unfortunately the camera was in the back; maybe on the way back north).
Clewiston claims to be the "Sweetest Town in America". We thought we had driven past numerous very large sugar cane fields and this Welcome to Clewiston sign and some others sort of verified it; eg. the directional sign to "Cane Stadium". The sugar cane was confirmed later in the evening when we chatted with some folks at the KOA. These fellows, from Alabama, are here working in the sugar plant down the way. We got chatting with them because we had to find out just what kind of large black snake we had just seen when we went to do some laundry.
Outside the laundry room door we abruptly stopped as this rather large (about 4') black snake slithered ahead of us. It tried to go under the door into the laundry as we loudly suggested "... no, not in there you stupid snake!..."; thankfully it decided to come back out and go off in search of nearby shade in the garden. So... back to the Alabama fellows; we went over and asked about the snake and they informed us that "black is good" (later confirmed by the lady in the KOA office)... Kris told the guy that we might have to go back to the Walmart and buy a gun; he said that a fundamental rule is to "never waste a bullet on a snake", at which point Kris said that she is so afraid of snakes that the gun was to use on herself just to get it over with!!! He said he had a gun and offered it up. Now, that's what we call southern hospitality!!! We all had a good laugh...:-))
That evening we drove around a bit in Clewiston and found ourselves at the Tiki Bar down on one of the marinas.
We chatted with the lady at the bar and asked about critters etc, telling her that we have never seen alligators in the wild. She said that we could look out the window into the marina and we might see one of the three alligators that live there or we might even see a manatee! However, she stressed that what we really need to be on the watch for is, you guessed it... SNAKES... and she said they get the odd snake, sometimes of the poisonous variety, up in the bar... Yikes!!!
The other thing that has plagued us since we headed south out of the Florida panhandle is that we are in the midst of the semi-annual Florida Lovebug infestation. Man, who knew that you could have so many bugs splattered on the front of the car! The truly sad thing about these bugs is that they were deliberately introduced to eat the mosquitoes. Turns out they don't eat mosquitoes (you would think someone would have checked this out more carefully) and nothing eats them because they are so acidic that when they splat on your car (and believe me, there are about 900 trillion of them on the front of the car by the end of the day), their bodies can pit the paint on the car. Which prompted another stop at Walmart to get bug remover spray (although a good old boy recommended we clean the car with Coke; didn't seem like a good idea to us. Probably gets the bugs off and attracts every wasp and bee in the area.)
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