Ruskin, Florida
February 27, 2023
Time for a wrap-up of our time in Ruskin before we start our travels again!
As we looked back on the almost 3-month stay at our RV park in Ruskin, a few thoughts came to mind:
1. Winter weather of mostly 70s and 80s and mostly sunny is really enjoyable. Julie does appreciate a change in seasons, but summer has always been her favorite. After getting her "winter fix" in Minnesota (and Minnesota did not disappoint this year!), she was surprised at how little she missed actual winter weather.
2. There is a lot of maintenance to be done on a rolling house that is constructed of materials barely stronger than cardboard (if you want to improve the odds that it keeps rolling).
3.When you live in one place, you suddenly loose the adventurous travel spirit of seeking out all of the touristy things to do. Something happens where you find yourself visiting Harbor Freight and Home Depot and feeling oddly satiated for the day.
4. Living in an RV park is not really that bad. Perhaps it's because we know that we're here only temporarily, but living within close quarters of other RVs is not as bad as we expected. At least there are glimpses of palm trees in the background. Plus, the neighbors have been friendly.
We added additional shade cloth to the deck that doubles as privacy screening, so we have a semi-private "retreat" out back.
5. We still really like retirement.
Upon our return from our Christmas vacation up north, we settled into a slow and easy pace of getting chores done with the occasional side trip to do fun things. That is, after we got over being sick--first Rick and then Julie. It wasn't too bad, and by the end of January we were back to normal.
As you may or may not recall, back in June, the tail light on Passpartout was crushed in an unfortunate incident which Julie will not rub in. We were able to find a replacement part in Lakeland which is about an hour away from our RV park. Conveniently, that gave us an excuse to go exploring in a new area.
Downtown Lakeland
The town botanical garden
A cormorant guarding its catch.
These birds are everywhere in Florida
Nearby was Circle B Bar Reserve which years ago used to be the Circle B Bar ranch. Now, it's a great place to see alligators.
Poetry on a park bench.
We gingerly tiptoed past this alligator.
We saw lots of the birds listed on this sign.
Back home, it was time for surgery.
It's like nothing ever happened!
Much of the past few months were not particularly blog-worthy--just slice-of-life-y.
Now that our kids are Minnesotans, we decided it was high time to try a Minnesota signature dish. As far as we can tell, "Hotdish" is pretty much any casserole that includes tater tots as a main component. We decided it was pretty good, and added it to our rotation.
Every evening we heard screechy bird noises. We affectionately called them duck-birds because they look like ducks but roost on wires. Their proper name is black-bellied whistler, and we discovered that people here at the park feed them.
We also discovered some Nanday Parakeets living in a telephone pole.
Rick playing computer surgeon in an attempt to fix his charging port. The surgery was a failure, and we had to take the patient to a professional.
On one of our "fun days", we took a trip to Anna Maria Island. Traffic on the island was pretty intense, so we opted to park the truck at a boat launch just after the bridge and ride our bikes from there. This turned out to be an excellent plan, as we made much better time than the gridlocked cars. Anna Maria is a fairly small island with super cute beach homes and the Gulf or bay within view almost everywhere. We biked through most of the island (about 16 miles) and spent a good amount of time sitting on the beach.
What a gorgeous day it was!
This guy was not shy about requesting a handout. We had nothing to offer.
Later, we picked up some burritos at a cute local joint and rode our bikes to a nice picnic spot to watch the sunset.
We ended up riding our bikes about 16 miles.No idea why it shows any elevation gain.
Another fun day was spent in search of the famous manatees. Manatees seek out warmer waters in the winter, and so they are typically found in various Florida springs. Or, they can be found near powerplant discharge sites. So, off to the nearby Tampa Electric Manatee Viewing Center we went.
Yep, it's a powerplant. But it is ecologically friendly because it provides habitat for cuddly seal-whale creatures 😉.
Apparently, the manatees are easiest to spot on a cool day. We went on a warm day. We did manage to see dark blobs in the water that occasionally surfaced for air.
Adjacent to the viewing area was a pleasant nature trail.
For our anniversary (which by the way was the nicest weather we ever had celebrating our February anniversary), we took a bike ride around Ft. De Soto County Park. Once again, we spent some quality time sitting on the beach. We rode around almost the entire park (10 miles) which had very nice bike trails throughout.
We got a kick out of the Jetson-esque picnic shelters. And the super-abundance of garbage cans.
Big bird in a big nest.
Just another day in paradise 😊.
It was fun watching these cute little birds run about.
Part of the beach was packed hard enough where we could ride our bikes on it.
Look around at our really nice sitting area in a very quiet section of beach
The blue flag is our nice beach location
After spending a wonderful afternoon riding and sitting on the beach, we packed up the truck and headed over to St. Petersburg for dinner at Hurricane Seafood Restaurant. Julie enjoyed her seafood medley dinner while Rick opted for a very tasty burger.
Hurricane's restaurant. Sure, it's touristy, but it was fun!
Happy 31 to us!
After dinner, we caught the sunset across the street...
As a little anniversary gift to each other, we bought a mini "fire pit" so we can have a "fire" on the deck. It's really just an alcohol burner, but it is quite mesmerizing to watch. We're looking forward to using it!
In a few days we will be leaving our home here in Ruskin and beginning our new chapter of travels for 2023. Hopefully, we'll remember how to hitch up the truck and pack everything away. It will feel strange to get into the routine of moving again!
Rick's corner (mostly tech-related):
We didn't end up seeing as many things in the area as we expected - partly because we were pretty darn busy catching up on all the things we don't do while traveling! I figured I would document some of these things so I can look back and see what I might have in store for me next year! These items are in no particular order.
Greased wheel bearings on trailer
Rotate tires on trailer (outside of some tires had extra wear and inside of others, so we switched them around to balance things out this year). Probably need to replace the tires after this year?
Measured brake pads and adjusted brakes on trailer
Grease all the zirk fittings (spring hangers, shackles, weight distribution hitch)
Take apart the hitch bolt that I had to replace and grease it (and grease the other side as well), replace some of the washers that had ware marks on them as well.
Caulk several spots on the trailer roof that either had very small holes (tree branches) or just looked a bit like the existing caulk was peeling.
Replace several sections of the plastic screw coverings that had gotten brittle and started cracking (Roof along the door side, above the awning, and both front cap pieces)
Stabilizers got removed, taken apart, wire brushed and scraped as best as I could, then coated with rust conversion paint, then sprayed with black Rustoleum. It looks like they were originally painted without first removing the manufacturing oil residue, as almost all the paint just fell off when I started scraping . . .
As you can see - they really needed some help
Bunch of random rust on the camper got the same treatment.
Purchase and replace the right rear tail light on the truck (remember we broke that in the mountains outside of Bozeman, Montana). I should have really drilled a hole in the bottom of the plastic to let water out when it happened - turned out it had looked fine, but it was actually filled with water. So, I ended up taking apart all the bulbs and cleaning out the connectors and applying some water displacement stuff to them, as well has having to completely take apart the side traffic warning radar unit to clean the circuit board inside of it (it was starting to throw faults).
This fancy electronic gadget was really really not supposed to be under water!
Sanitize the entire water system (run bleach through everything and let it set a couple of hours).
Replace all the water filters: (two big filters (sediment, carbon), RO membrane, RO post carbon filter.
Replace the anode rod in the water heater (and flush the water heater).
Replace our internet phone (Visible changed their network and our existing phone was not compatible with the upgraded network - so it was going to stop working at some point in the future). Turns out that Visible does not like us not having a real home physical address. I spent hours and hours with both technical support chat (they don't really have humans to talk to) as well as our credit card companies trying to get Visible to ship me a phone at my current location at the RV park. They simply could not ship to a location other than our "official" mailing address and would not accept our official mailing address (which is on the credit cards) as a valid mailing address . . . . so in the end I ended up creating a new Visible account with a spare email address I have and then begging Alan to buy me a phone and ship it to me after he got it (he used his address in St. Paul and his credit card to buy the phone). After that fiasco I was able to change the billing address and credit card back to mine and they so far seem happy accepting my money for the monthly service.
Purchase and setup a new router for the camper. I think some of our internet problems have been related to the crowding of nearby routers at some of our locations filling up all available WiFi channels in the 2.4 Ghz range. The new router does both 2.4 Ghz and 5Ghz so most all of our devices can connect to the new 5 Ghz channel. From what I see it doesn't look like most campground people use the new 5 Ghz channels so we mostly have it all to ourselves!
Wash the deck roof to get all the sap and mildew type stuff off of it.
Create a new method of blocking the sun from coming through our deck awning (which is made of frosted corrugated plastic normally used for green houses). Previously, we had a fitted tarp that we would put over the roof when we needed additional sun shading. The issue we found was that it would beat itself to death when it got windy. Our solution entailed buying some Reflectix to cut into individual squares to fit on the underside framing of our deck roof using binder clips to hold them in place. It now takes putting up 16 squares of Reflectix, but we should be able to leave it up when it rainy and/or windy without issue. Plus, the Reflectix really keeps the heat down.
Not the prettiest-but effective!
Interior caulking where there were some new cracks developing in some corners, as well as some locations where the paint didn't stick properly (so we just caulked it instead - the caulk sticks better).
Update all the electronics (Portable GPS, Garmin in the truck, all the Victron electronics for the solar controllers and battery monitors)
Design a new method for strapping the bikes in place in the back of the truck: Re-position the guides I have in the bed and tie wrap them down to the bed rug, use some foam shop mat material from Harbor Freight to build some new bumpers for next to and between the bikes, and get everything so the bikes are more upright and not rubbing on the window screen and mashing my bike bag.
Take apart all 9 electronic candles and install voltage regulators into them so they don't dim over time as the batteries run down. Now they will stay the same brightness until the batteries are dead. I ended up finding super small 3 volt regulators on Amazon that came in a 10 pack, and using an Exacto knife to cut through the glue joint on the bottom of the candles so I could take them apart and insert the regulator circuit between the batteries and the switch. This means that the regulator drains the battery even when the candles are off - but we never turn them off with the switch opting instead to use the remote control. The end result is that the candles run the batteries down quite a bit faster but will still run over a week without changing the batteries. We use Eneloop rechargeable batteries for all of these so it doesn't really matter that we end up running them down sooner - it just takes an hour to recharge each battery instead of the half an hour it used to take.
The red wires are new and connect to the new board I installed.
Purchase and use a windshield repair kit to fix the rock chip we got in the truck drivers side of the windshield.
The USB-C charging port had died on Rick's laptop (there was another one I could use until I got it fixed). Purchased a new USB-C port connector from Amazon, took the whole laptop apart and brought the main board to what looked like a really sketchy cell phone repair place that does micro-soldering for them to replace the port connector, then re-assemble the laptop several times. It took several times for me to get all the connectors inside all connected happily so the laptop fully worked again. I do have to say - all those parts inside of laptops have gotten really really small these days - hard to work with.
Put some new coats of polyurethane on the kitchen table (with the U.S. map under the finish): There were some scratches and marks that we wanted to cover so we purchased a small jar of matte water based polyurethane which went on fine and looked pretty good. That was before we spilled a small amount of alcohol on the table and found out that alcohol completely dissolves water based poly! I have no idea why all the comparison websites between water and old based poly didn't mention that as a serious con - I mean who hasn't spilled beer, wine, brandy on your table at some point? So we then headed back to home depot and bought some regular oil based Poly and put that on. It did yellow the table and leave a bit of yellow shading where we applied it unevenly but all in all it looks quite good. The finish on the oil poly turned out to be much better than the water based, and it should be more durable - so hopefully we are done coating the table!
Spend quality time at many many stores to purchase the stuff that is hard to find on the road: New hiking shoes for both Rick and Julie, convertible pants for Julie, Rick needed some new "around town" shoes as well as some nicer boot type shoes to use in St. Paul where they *gasp* have snow.
Made our last pilgrimage to Costco to stock up on those things we really like Costco for (especially their Parmesan cheese) and then cancel the membership. It turns out there really are not many Costco locations out west so we just don't get a chance to use the membership.
Doctors, dentist, other doctors, dentist again, etc . . . . turns out that it doesn't appear anything is going to immediately kill us so we are free to move about the country again 😀
We also made use of a local Amazon locker to buy all kinds of stuff. Walking to the locker helped keep us in shape (at least a little) for our upcoming summer hiking adventures.
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