Time to Head to Florida

Since it's been a week-and-a-half since we left home, I guess it's time we cross the Florida state line pretty soon.  It's been great to just "meander" down here - very leisurely pace!  We spent four days in Columbus, then three at High Falls, and now three at Reed Bingham, but tomorrow morning we'll be heading south for the last leg of our trip down.  We still plan to take two days to get all the way down to Fort Myers, which is probably kind of silly but we really like to only drive a few hours a day if time permits (which it does since Thanksgiving was SO early this year).  We'll only be drving about 200 miles tomorrow - as far as Bushnell, which is just north of the Tampa area, and then we'll get down to Pine Island pretty early on Saturday.

Our time here at Reed Bingham has, as usual, been very pleasant.  The weather yesterday wasn't GREAT, but it wasn't too bad (certainly not compared to home, where we hear a little snow has fallen!).  But today was very nice - in the low 60's and sunny all day.  We just got back from having a very nice dinner at Carter's Catfish House, which is about 20 yards outside the park limits.  I had this excellent deviled crab, which was sort of like little crab cakes smooshed into crab shells - 4 of them - along with an excellent twice-baked potato, the salad bar, and hush puppies (I LOVE hush puppies!).  Dave had a grilled shrimp salad, with a huge bowl of crispy fresh salad ingredients and 3 skewers of shrimp - 12 shrimp total.  And our total bill was $28.85!  What a bargain!  This place is only open Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings and it's almost worth scheduling your trip around their hours.  Excellent!

We had two lovely campfires during the two evenings we've been here - we had to use the rest of Dave's "scrounged" firewood since we won't be having any more fires for two months now.  One of the disadvantages of staying a month each at the next two RV resorts is no campfires.  We've already decided that next year we're going to spend more time in state parks -we really are campground people at heart!

Most of the rest of our time here we spent taking walks, Dave riding his bike, and me still focusing on getting back into my running program - I can NOT believe how much ground I lost over the past couple of months!  Valuable lesson to be learned.

But the most exciting thing that occurred over the past three days involved our little "wild child", Brandi!  (Surprise!)  There is a really nice hiking trail here in the park, that goes down to the river but has an extensive length of elevated board walk that is built maybe five feet off the ground and goes through this kind of swamp land along the edge of the river.  There is one point along the boardwalk where a side path goes down to an observation deck right over the river.  From the observation deck you can go down about five or six steps to a "raft" that kind of floats right in the river - I think it's there so people could possibly pull up in a canoe or kayak and climb onto the raft and then do part of the hike.  Anyway, we were down on that raft area when Brandi decided to lean way over and get a drink of water and all of a sudden SPLASH she fell headlong into the river.  We have no idea how deep it is, but she definitely was way over her head - and she is not normally a swimmer - she doesn't ever go out past her belly.  So Dave and I are yelling and screaming and she's dog-paddling like crazy and swims UNDERNEATH the raft.  Now Dave and I are terrified because we don't know if she'll get trapped underneath there or how in the world we're going to be able to reach her.  Fortunately, she swam out from under the raft and headed toward shore, where she climbed up and started running through the swamp.  We couldn't get to her because the whole boardwalk is too high above the swamp for us to get down, or for her to jump up.  So we had to walk as fast as we could to where the boardwalk FINALLY got lower to the ground and she could finally jump up.  But while we were trying to get to that area we were calling to her so she'd stay with us and she was RUNNING RUNNING RUNNING from one side of the boardwalk, underneath it, and over to the other side in these huge circles.  We could tell she was pretty frantic and couldn't figure out how to get up to us.  When we finally got to the area where she could jump up and rejoin us on the boardwalk, she was gasping and panting and was just crazy frantic.  POOR POOR baby.  When we finally got back to the RV, she jumped up on "her" couch (we all know the couch belongs to her!) and basically passed out for the rest of the day.  So once again, Brandi seems to provide the highlest level of drama for the trip.  Fortunately we love her to pieces, and we were SO relieved that she was ok.  Naughty girl-she really had us scared.

So now that THAT is all over, we are ready to pack things up and head south where we can really unpack and get settled in for a month long stay.  By the time I post the next blog we should be safely settled into the KOA on Pine Island (right off Fort Myers) and enjoying our 80 degree weather.