Men always want to be a woman’s first love – women like to be a man’s last romance.

– Oscar Wilde

One of the premier public events in Miami Beach is the annual Halloween block party on Lincoln Road. It is always packed with revelers and a very high percentage of them in full costume, many of contest winning quality.  It starts out kid friendly, but as dark settles in the guises tend towards the risqué and outright bawdy.  

Rosie and I have attended several times, though not for either of the last two years, so with our pending departure we made sure not to miss this one.  Besides, since we are temporarily living on Lincoln Road we really have no excuse for missing such a fantastic event.  We did not have to worry about parking or trying to arrive early enough to lock down a table, we just dressed up and headed down the block.

This is part of our “Saying Goodbye to Miami” process, for which we have been gathering a flexible list of events, restaurants, and places to visit in our home town before we leave for a year journey around the country.

A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.

– George Carlin

After nearly a year of aggressively cutting back, selling off, and giving away your “stuff” in preparation for full-time RVing, it can get a little disheartening when your planned adventure start date approaches and yet your list of major possessions lingers, as if those items are clinging to you rather than the reverse.  Though we have made great progress, our biggest item, the condo, remained unsold.  Back in July we thought we had such a sure thing with a cash buyer offering 98% of our asking price!  I might post all the sordid details later as a lesson learned, but for now suffice it to say that our easy 30 day closing turned into a painful 90 day affair, and yet today we are finally able to let all the frustration with the process go.  It’s done, condo sold!

Insert your own Titanic joke at this point, but we just returned from a wonderful one week cruise on the NCL Getaway to the Eastern Caribbean, with port visits in St Martin, St Thomas, and the Bahamas.  I visited many Carib ports aboard various Navy ships, and after a dozen seemingly similar islands it becomes harder to appreciate the differences between them.  St Martin, however, always stood out in my memory as a place worthy to revisit, so we were glad to take advantage of this cruise itinerary.

Though the ship was significantly larger than we would normally prefer, our NCL Personal Cruise Consultant (la-dee-da), Lee, caught us in a moment of weakness (after several glasses of wine) and the last minute price was great. During a meet-up on our last NCL cruise, several fellow passengers advised us that “we were cruising wrong,” so on their advice we splurged for a balcony stateroom.  Now we are totally spoiled for it, and can’t see ourselves going back to a standard room again.

A quick summary of NCL versus other options:  Those that know us know that we work the airline and hotel loyalty programs to the maximum extent, so prior to our first big ship cruise in 2007 we researched the different lines with the intent of biasing all of our future cruises with one line so as to derive the loyalty benefits of “elite” status, once achieved. Our research suggested that NCL would be the right line for three reasons: the right casual vs. formal balance, reasonable prices points, and age range of the passengers.  NCL lacks the party-hard-all-night attitude we associate with Carnival, while retaining their “Freestyle” cruising sensibility missing from the more formal lines.  Price wise, we might be able to do better on Carnival, but we found NCL significantly cheaper than Celebration, Holland America, and other higher end lines.  Similarly, the age range on NCL tends to be rather wide, while some of the upper end lines skew towards a much older demographic.

Finally, for the skeptical navy sailors out there that have trouble imagining themselves voluntarily boarding a cruise ship for their limited leave time: take all the good things about being at sea and subtract watchstanding, morning quarters, bad food, cold showers, the XO, BECCES, and pretty much all the tedious responsiblities.

 

Memorial Day weekend in Miami Beach can be a chaotic mess, leaving residents two acceptable choices: get out of town or don’t leave the house. This year we opted for the former, though perhaps foolishly headed for a destination just as fraught with traffic and crowding challenges: Key West, FL. We were eager for a full road test of the recent repairs made by Mario of Diesel Outlaw (a solid, honest, and reliable diesel roadside specialist) and boy did this trip put the Big Kahuna through his paces. Normally it would take us 3 ½ hours to make the trip from Miami to Key West, but the traffic jams in the upper keys resulted in a 5 hour trip down on Saturday and 6 hours to return home on Monday. Despite the frustration of traffic, we count the trip a rousing success due to the enjoyable time we had, the lessons we learned, and the solid performance of the bus.

I had run across the RV Park owned by the Key West Naval Air Station during previous trips to the keys, sans motorhome, when Rosemarie and I stayed in the rental town houses also owned by the Navy’s Moral Welfare and Recreation department. But it was not until another recent convert to motorhome ownership arrived in the office to tout the excellent location and affordable price of this military owned park that I seriously considered staying there with our RV. At $23 a day for a full hook up (50 amp power, potable water, and sewage) you simply can’t beat the price. Nowhere else in the keys, especially Key West, will you find such a deal.

The catch is that for retirees there are no reservations, it’s first come first serve. I have gotten conflicting information about the likelihood of showing up and not getting a spot. During the off season, particularly the Summer, I was told there are always openings, and yet when we arrived the camp host told us we got the very last of the 94 full hook up sites. I was told by multiple residents that during the Winter high season the managers enforce a rotation system whereby the long term residents will periodically shift from the full hook up spots to one of the more than 400 dry camping sites, which are significantly cheaper, ($13 per day), but it was not clear if a rotation would be forced upon a resident just because a short termer like myself showed up with all the full hook up spots already filled.

The dry camping sites are actually a good option during the more tolerable winter months for those equipped with generators or solar panels, particularly if you want to position your rig much closer to the downtown Key West scene. The main RV site with the hook up spots is located at the Sigsbee compound, about a 3 mile ride to Duval Street and Mallory Square. One of the overflow locations for the dry campers, however, is located at the Trumbo Point facility, less than a mile from all the action.

One of the realities of parking on a military facility is the plethora of inconsistently enforced rules. For instance, depending on who is checking you in, you are likely to have to show the full range of paperwork (registration, insurance, driver license) for both your RV and tow vehicle. Did you bring your bikes? Great, now where are your helmets? That’s right, it is mandatory to wear them while riding anywhere on the base. Did you want to snorkel next to the shore? Better have your dive flag! Got a motorcycle? You will need not only a helmet, but proof of safety course completion, long pants, long shirt sleeves, full fingered gloves, over the ankle boots, googles, and a reflective vest. Fortunately, with the exception of the over the top motorcycle rules, most of this stuff is pretty easy to comply with. But having stayed mainly at, shall we say, looser facilities, we were caught off guard by a couple of the requirements.

Lest this turn into a glorified camp review more suited to Yelp or Trip Advisor, a few words and pictures about what we actually did. Arriving in the mid-afternoon on Saturday, we pulled in next to Brian and his daughter Clementine, a very welcoming and helpful family that gave us the low down on the park and local entertainment. After exploring a bit of the area on foot, and on Brian’s advice, we spent the evening enjoying the live music and cheap drinks at the Sunset Lounge, along with an appropriately spectacular sunset. On Sunday we slept late, walked, biked, and did some shore snorkeling after renting a dive flag ($2/day) from the marina. We spent a fantastic evening in communal meal with Brian, Clementine, and another local long termer, Master Chief Jim, with much storytelling, political debate, fine barbecued food and more than a few drinks. It would be hard to say which part of the meal was the highlight; given the evidence I am sure Clementine would vote for Rosie’s ribs, but I would have to support Brian’s fresh caught grilled file fish served on toasted tortillas with avocado.

After a leisurely breakfast the next morning, we packed up, said our good byes, and began the long trip home. The first 60 miles sailed by without a hitch, but once we reached Marathon we ended up in a virtual parking lot for more than an hour, and sporadic stop and go traffic all the way up to Key Largo. Somewhere in the vicinity of Tavernier we pulled over at one of the popular roadside public parks for an hour to snorkel and relax before making the final stretch home, and made the wise decision to take car Sound Road rather than US1 from Key Largo to Florida City, saving us from additional traffic induced headaches.

We got the Big Kahuna stowed away in Opa Locka before heading to Miami Beach, marveling about how nice it is to arrive home even after a nice mini vacation. It is this sense of “home” that will be most critical for us to recreate in the motorhome when we move in full time.

Last year, while we still owned our ’78 GMC Motorhome, we committed to attending the final rally of the 2013-2014 season with the GMC Sunshine Statesmen.  As I have mentioned before, this is a fantastic group of helpful and enthusiastic classic GMC Motorhome owners, and once you’re a member they don’t kick you out if you shift to “SOB” (Some Other Brand) status. So last weekend we packed up the Big Kahuna and headed south towards Marathon Key for three days of fun, sun and comradery.  

Our intention had been to wake up early on Friday, pick up the bus at our storage lot on the Opa Locka Coast Guard Station (thank you, tax payers, for this heavily subsidized and secure storage option available to all military retirees) to start the 2.5 hour drive deep into the Florida Keys.  Some of you may recall that last year we took a one night, two day trip this way in the Silver Shell, and absolutely loved the very affordable state park we had spent the night in during that trip.  So on a whim, I started daily checks of the Florida State Park reservations website, knowing that our preferred location is extremely popular with RVers and campers, and thus very hard to get into on short notice. 

This tactic, emphasize enough I can’t.  People change their minds, plans alter, life happens, and so the attentive and persistent can often find last minute openings at the popular places through daily checks of the reservations sites.  This process paid off last year for our short notice trip to the Keys, and again when the remarkable Gamble Rogers State Park opened up for us the night before we needed it during our trip South with the bus, and for the third time we got lucky, locking in a one night stay at Bahia Honda State Park for the night before our planned arrival at the GMC Rally in Marathon. Thursday afternoon I left work a bit early, Rosemarie and I loaded up the bus, and delayed only slightly for repair of an air system leak near the windshield wiper controls that I had discovered the previous day during my preparatory checks, we headed south towards Big Pine Key.  We beat rush hour traffic and enjoyed a scenic and relatively low stress three hour drive, arriving in the very early evening in time to explore, do some geocaching, and enjoy the perfectly positioned sunsets that Bahia Honda offers.  

The next day we snorkeled in the protected bay, explored the bridge overlook, found one more geocache, and then packed up the bus for a short trip up to Marathon Key for the rally.  We have been having a battery charge problem of late, which we resolved with a fast charge, and the reverse gear solenoid still needs replacing, but our mechanic Mario at Diesel Outlaw, had shown us a short term fix that allows us to get the bus into reverse gear until he can make permanent repairs.  So after a 30 minute drive north we arrived at the Jolly Roger Travel Park in time for cocktail hour with the GMC Sunshine Statesmen. 

Spoiled as we are by wonderful and low priced state parks, as well as a couple of Passport America affiliated private parks (PA membership proffers a 50% discount at these spots, referrals available!) I was highly skeptical that this private park would be worth even the out of season rates ($74, more for the premier locations near the seawall).  But the GMC club negotiated a 25% discount, the park is fantastic, the managers are some of the most helpful and enthusiastic we have encountered, and the amenities are top notch. 

Our friends, the Nieves, joined us the next day with their three girls, and we all enjoyed the cute salt water pool, outdoor cabanas, and of course the protected snorkeling area.  This lagoon is teeming with Florida lobster!  The entire seawall is lined with them in every crevice.  In addition to the thousands of near shore fish species, big hermit crabs, gorilla crabs, and coral banded shrimp, we also got lucky with a small nurse shark completely out in the open.   

The Big Kahuna is set to comfortably accommodate four adults, but with an air mattress in the dining area and a tiny, kicking, squirming, early rising child stuffed into the foot of one bed, we made it work for seven for one night.   We followed a leisurely morning at the lagoon and pool with a grilled lunch and an early afternoon pack up and departure.  Rosemarie and I are starting to get the arrival and departure routines down to a smoothly flowing process of delineated responsibilities, often involving my assigned role of mild to moderate swearing and her assigned role of calming influence, and with only a bit more battery drama we were off and running for the 2.5 hour return drive home. 

The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted,
Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

As Jay Leno, or at least a parody of him, would say: “Have you heard about this? Have you seen this?” This being geocaching. We had heard about this adult version of GPS-enabled Easter egg hunting last year, and decided to give it a try. What fun! The gist of it is that participants have hidden thousands upon thousands of caches throughout the world, and posted the GPS coordinates, descriptions, and hints on the main website. Registered users can check the site or a mobile app for caches near them or in any designated area, and navigate to the caches, find them, and log it in to keep track of your finds. It is far more fun than I am making it sound, and is great for learning about an area or breaking up the monotony of a long trip. The range of difficulty, by which I mean both the terrain and cleverness of the hiding spot, varies from easy to very difficult. Rosemarie and I started with a couple of caches a dozen blocks north of our condo in Miami Beach, and have since enjoyed the hobby during out trip across Alligator Alley, in and around Punta Gorda, and most recently in Bahia Honda State Park in the Florida Keys. As this is a rather esoteric subject that might not be of interest to many of the tens of readers we have, we will be keeping most of our geocaching information and posts in a separate tab, which you can find near the top of our site just below the header picture of the Big Kahuna bus.

As we mentioned in the last post, buying our big bus was only the first step, we also had to get it down to Miami in time for both of us to get back to work. We aren’t retired yet! Though our salesman, Matt, had given us as much time as we needed with him to get a feel for the bus, it was up to us to learn the idiosynchrasies of driving it, and so with much trepidation we pulled out of the Wilmington RV lot pointed towards US-17 South.

We had made the quite deliberate choice to avoid I-95 for the first couple of days so we could get the hang of the bus at slower speeds, to enjoy the views a bit more than the interestate would allow, and to take a shorter route to Charleston for a nice overnight in a county park we had located on James Island. Our plan was to take it in four stages: Wilmington to Charleston, on to Savannah, on to the vicinity of St Augustine, then the last leg to Miami. The first leg was quite a learning experience, as driving any new vehicle can be, but doubly so with a large rig. The automatic transmission sequencing system took some getting used to, and we had a bit of a panic at one point when the driver’s side mirror started to slowly swing in towards the bus body, completely eliminating my side and rear views on the driver side. Fortunately this required but a quick stop to tighten a nut, and other than that the bus performed better than we could have hoped.

We took a break for lunch at British pub, which may or may not be called The Bull and Balls, conveniently located right beside the highway. Here we ran into our first significant problem in the parking lot: I didn’t properly scope it out before pulling in, we were forced to do a multi-point turn to get out… and the bus did not want to go into reverse. We would later learn this is probaby a sticky solenoid switch that, for now, needs to be gently encouraged to go into gear with the right shifting sequence rather than brute forced. After much fiddling with the transmission controls and a 20 point turn I was pointed towards freedom in a temporary though not entirely legal parking spot. We finished our enjoyable lunch complete with Scottish egg balls or whatnot, and were on our way to Charleston’s James Island County Park.

It was a relatively easy journey, though the bus balked at the steeper bridges and dropped down to first gear to clear them, and I balked at the few miles of narrow back roads leading to the park, but once in it was a great little place to stay. The friendly staff advertised themesleves as one of the top ten county parks in the country, and I highly recommend it. Lots of hiking and biking trails, some nice little ponds, beautiful trees and spacious RV parking. We had a bit more trouble backing it in to our spot, but with each reverse attempt I figured out the requirements a bit more and it became steadily easier to maneuver this beast. We arrived only an hour or two before dusk, so we did not have much of a chance to enjoy the park, but it is definably on our list to come back to when we make another East coast venture. Though at $39 a night (Good Sam discounted rate for a back in spot with water and electricity) it was a little steeper than the state parks we have previously used, we still thought it a decent deal.
We were far more tired than anticipated; the stress of a six hour drive combined with not having the time to figure out how to turn on the bus heaters combined to make us sleep in far later than planned. We took a referesing warm shower in the park facilities and got on the road close to noon, consoling ourselves with the knolweldge that we were well rested and Savannah was a shorter drive than the previous day’s. This trip went smoother though there were a few moments of tense anticipation as we approached downtown Savannah, but our concerns were unfounded; the path to Savannah’s MLK Visitor Information Center was but a couple of easily made turns right off of US-17. We had found this option with a bit of internet research: you can park even a large RV in the visitor center overnight for only $10, and this is the only place within walking distance of the riverfront that you can do so.

We had arrived in plenty of time for some daylight activity, so we bought a $5 tour book and took a self guided walking tour of the historic riverfront area, ending at the river’s edge near all the shops, bars and restaurants. Because the food at ocean and river front tourist destinations can be overpriced and of questionable quality, we intended on using the excellent Yelp and Travel Advisor reviews for a restaurant recommendation at least a few blocks off the river. But once on river we stumbled across a great and affordable craft beer oriented bar, The Warehouse, with an excellent restaurant, Fiddler’s, but a few doors down serving large, fresh and delicious raw oysters. We had two dozen and called it a night.

The visitor center parking lot had emptied considerably, we were the only large bus left, and it felt safe and remained quite for us to sleep there. We had a pretty good night, the only down side was the lack of a warm shower the next morning before we headed for the Florida border, gassing up one least time before hitting the noticeable price jump in the Sunshine State.Though it was the shortest, this was our most exciting leg with our first major mechanical problem. The RV dealership had warned me about a very small pinhole leak coming from the driver side windshield wiper valve. The bus is heavily reliant on a compressed air system which effects the brakes, ride cushioning, and various control mechanisms. Ideally the system will pump up to 90 psi upon start, and will hold that pressure for weeks. A small leak means the compressor will kick on intermittently to maintain pressure. The dealership felt the leak was just annoying enough to warrant a temporary jury rig fix: a pair of vice grips on the hose leading to the wiper control, which worked… for a while. For three days to be precise. As we left Savannah, we noticed the leak for the first time, a tiny little sound at first, but growing louder with each mile and sufficient that we could feel it coming from below the dash. Then all hell broke loose as the hose cracked around the vice grips, causing the system to lose pressure fast, an unholy rushing sound filled the cabin such that we had to shout to hear each other, and the bus was barely able to maintain sufficient pressure to keep going. We nursed it 19 miles down the road to the nearest Love’s, having heard good reviews about their service. Such reviews are justified as the mechanics on duty there fixed us up within two hours for only $98. We still have the original tiny leak, but the aggravated hose break is repaired until I can get to the wiper control valve.

We got quite lucky with the weather, skirting under the rain for almost the entire trip, and apparently missing a deluge just before we arrived in Flagler Beach at Gamble Rogers State Park, one of the only places in Florida where you can park your rig right up to the dunes in front of the beach. We were quite lucky to get a spot here; I had been checking every day for weeks looking for a cancellation, and two days before arrival one popped open. This is a fanstastic RV campground, about 5 miles from the intestate with warm showers, nice sized spots, and you could not ask for better views. We had plenty of time for a walk on the beach before dinner and a solid night’s rest listening to the waves crash outside our window.

The last day was a grind: six hours of driving, mostly down I-95, which deserves all of its reputation as a stress inducing highway. We were at least able to start the day with a fantastic cruise for 15 miles down A1A, and I highly recommend this stretch of coastal road from Flagler Beach to Ormand Beach for a fun and scenic cruise. We turned inland before reaching Daytona Beach, and then it was hundreds of miles of interstate. Truth be told, I-95 in Florida on a weekend other than holiday travel periods is not that bad South of Jacksonville until you approach the Fort Lauderdale area, where it picks up significantly, culminating in every driver’s nightmare in Miami. I drive this road every week, but this was the first time in a bus, and it was… not fun. We managed it, but arriving at our storage area on the Opa Locka airport was quite a relief, doubly so since before arriving we were not entirely sure if our big boy would fit in the spot formerly held by the 26′ GMC, but it did with no more than 2 feet to spare. Exhausted but exhilarated, we piled into our waiting Saab and headed to our condo, mission complete.