The 2025 Travel Season Is Almost Here
March 25, 2025
Another winter has flown by. That is a statement that is so opposite to what we Northern Natives are used to saying. Usually, it's the summer the flies by and the winter that drags on and on and on. Perhaps that will be our experience again in the future, but for now, we are soaking in the last rays of Florida winter sunshine before we start heading north again.
Our last post was way back in December, and as per our usual winter routine, not much exciting happened with us except our annual trek up North for Christmastime, lots of camper maintenance (Rick's department), and lots of planning for our travels (Julie's department). We did also manage to venture off for a couple of semi-interesting day trips, though.
Our randomly-assigned campsite at good ole Lone Pine RV Park was definitely a step up from previous years. This time, we had the luxury of a site that backed to some woods, so we didn't have anyone behind us. Plus, we were right across from the laundry facilities, which turned out to be a heck of a lot more convenient than going to the Soap Opera laundromat down the road.
Our "posh" campsite with concrete pad and *nature*!
Our favorite "duck birds" welcomed us back to our winter home with their cheerful chattering
As usual, December was spent visiting all the doctors and dentists that middle-aged people tend to visit every year, as well as getting ready to fly to Minnesota to visit the kids. In January, the weather was quite cool here (by Florida standards), and we had several days where the highs barely reached the 50s and the nights were in the 30s. We ended up running our heater several of the mornings and during the day at least once. Come February and March, most of the days were in the 70s and 80s and sunny.
We took our annual trek to Anna Maria Island to ride our bikes around for the day. We were surprised to find that it had almost completely recovered from the two hurricanes that battered and flooded the island last September/October.
Julie can never get enough shots of the ocean 🙂
Later in the day some fog moved in, creating unique photo opportunities
Random people we don't know
This just seems funny somehow
On our anniversary, we headed north an hour and a half to check out Tarpon Springs and go to a Greek restaurant for dinner. We made a stop at the Florida Botanical Gardens along the way.
Florida Botanical Gardens
A duck that is not a mallard!
Papayas
Bananas (Or, if you prefer...banannas 😉--a little inside joke concerning a green glass door)
a big kapok tree
Looks like springtime!
The Botanical Gardens had a re-created old-time village
Not to be overly knit-picky, but I believe it should be spelled "capital"
They still harvest actual sponges here (and sell them for NOT cheap at the tourist gift shops in town)
Cute bench!
Happy 33rd Anniversary to us!
We enjoyed some wine here (together) and listened to some good live music
Feeling lucky?
The restaurant was very...blue...but the food was excellent!
Another semi-quasi interesting thing we did over the winter was to buy a bread machine. Rick has dutifully made our healthy breakfast bread every week since we retired (as a replacement for our equally healthy but far less enticing "fiber pucks" that we used to eat). Julie had been suggesting for quite a while that we buy a bread machine (mostly so that she didn't have to keep listening to him groan as he kneaded the fairly dense dough week after week). When we decided to ditch the bulky espresso maker for a more compact AeroPress, some counter space suddenly opened up. Shortly afterwards, a bread machine showed up at our doorstop as our anniversary gift to each other.
It has taken a little experimentation to get in the groove of making perfect acceptable bread, but we're getting the hang of it!
A first attempt at a rosemary Parmesan loaf (dough was too wet) --Tasted good, but probably would have been better as a bread bowl for soup 😉
We (really just Rick) eventually got fancy and dove into making home-made English muffins!
And now for the big unveiling of the 2025 travel plan!
Here's our itinerary:
April: Florida, Georgia, Minnesota (for Easter), Tennessee
May: Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa
June: Iowa, South Dakota, Montana
July: Montana, Alberta Canada
August: British Columbia Canada, Washington, Oregon, California
September: California, Nevada
October: Utah, Arizona, New Mexico
November: Texas, Mississippi, Georgia
December-March: Florida
As always, if anyone would like to meet up with us, let us know!
That's about it for the "exciting" stuff. If you find camper projects exciting, be sure to check out Rick's corner below before you go. Otherwise, stay tuned in a week or two for the first real 2025 travel post!
Rick's Corner
I did all the usual things I do during winter such as greasing things, painting things, gluing things, buying all the Amazon stuff that can't be delivered to a box, etc. You can just read last years winter post for a detailed list - its mostly all the same stuff every year (excepting the slide--the slide should not have to be redone every year) 🙂.
Ahhh - replacing suspension parts and greasing wheel bearings! Always a favorite activity
Hmmm - some rodent started eating the air filter on the truck 😲
Clearing out the nest made of filter shreddings
The major time consuming task this year was actually an IT task -- Julie's laptop is too old to transition to Windows 11 and we don't want to buy a new computer yet, so I magnanimously gave her my (newer and nicer) laptop. I then reformatted Julie's the-old-but-new-to-me laptop and installed Linux (Mint Cinnamon to be exact). I only had to take the laptop apart two or three times 🙂.
We had already converted over most of our stuff away from Microsoft anyways (using LibreOffice, and other free things), so the conversion went pretty well. And, our printer and scanner "just worked", so that was a pleasant surprise as well. As with all things new, the conversion provided lots of items for me to research and set up to get it "just right".
Part of the conversion was working with our son Alan to make sure our blogging software would work under Linux (Thanks Alan!). It turns out that he had already wisely used a cross platform toolkit to develop it - so it didn't take that much to make it work just fine on my laptop.
Another project was to write an application in Python (using Tkinter as the UI) to copy our pictures from our Phones to our blogging memory stick. The new application makes it a more streamlined and hopefully error-proof process. As a bonus, it is also cross platform, so it works on Julie's Windows laptop as well as my Mint laptop.
In the end, the conversion was successful, and I am actually much happier with Mint. Being slightly more free from the tyranny of the mega-corps just feels good.
Perhaps Julie's laptop will be next 😁.
There is also an ongoing project involving myself and Alan to get the family off of OneNote and move our data into a new application with data hosting on a server running in the kids' house (it already exists doing other server stuff).
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