We had managed to snag one of the increasingly hard to come by weekend openings at Blue Springs State Park, just a couple of miles from our last location, Orange City RV Resort.  This would be our last four days in Central Florida before heading down to Coral Springs for Thanksgiving and then over to Naples and Sanibel for the first part of December.

The front of our Blu Springs site was pretty narrow, to the point that we could barely put the slides out and the awning was a no-go.

But the back of the site was spacious, opening out into our own fire pit area.

The actual spring at Blue Springs had been closed to swimming due to Hurricane Irma related contamination for the first few weeks after our return to the area in October, so I had not made much effort to secure a reservation there.  Now that the water looked to be clear, they had not bothered to test it because the manatees showed up, which prompts an automatic closure of the spring to swimming as well.  Ah well, it’s a beautiful place to stay and the spring is lovely even if you can’t get in it.

We would not have had a lot of time to enjoy things here anyway as we had three markets to attend during the four day stay.  Our favorite, DeLand, resulted in our worst profit for that market ever, but was still good enough to justify attending.  My theory is that we are not close enough to Christmas to enjoy that rush, we depleted our “new vendor bump” during the first three Fridays this year, and the market is becoming saturated with jewelers (I counted 13 this last market) as more vendors learn of the event.

One of PKM’s nemesis.

While on Whidbey Island Rosemarie had added a new item, mermaid crowns, made from shell covered tiaras, to the sales table.  This month she added Christmas ornaments, clear glass globes with a collection of shells, beach sand, and sea glass.  This is only the second holiday that we managed to get out in front of in terms of sale items.

Saturday at the Lake Mary market produced much better results than Deland, and Sunday at Sweetwater-Wekiva was solid as well, allowing us to close out our November market push with ten events ranging from decent to wildly successful.  Ten markets for November is near a peak month for us, so we look forward to a bit of a break from it over Thanksgiving.  We will enjoy eleven day market free stretch then, but we will be right back on the bicycle for another ten events or so in Naples and Central Florida.

Bus and RV parking area at Blue Springs State Park.

Monday morning we broke camp but delayed our southward journey long enough to park the rig down close to the spring and take one last stroll along the boardwalk and nature trail.  Next up: Coral Springs and Thanksgiving.