I’ve started the South Carolina Post Office photo book. I liked yesterday’s photo collage thing so well I’m going to use it on the cover.
Returned from home Florida today in a marathon 13 hour 607 mile drive, making 8 pit stops along the way. Two for meals, one for a snack, two for gas and 3 just for driver changes. Somewhere south of Orlando the Emperor passed through the 101,000 mile mark. Total mileage for the trip – 1608 miles.
We are always careful about checking for Clemson home football games before heading into the SC upstate, but completely forgot to check for a University of Florida game before planning our route home. We were “forced” off of I-75 near Ocala by the rapidly multiplying Gator fans on their way to the game. Turns out it was for the better though, as we got to retrace some of our route down along some fantastic rural central Florida roads in the opposite direction.
Did the sane thing and avoided any place that had anything to to with shopping today.
We went 1 for 2 in local Palm City geocaches in the morning. There is another that we started after, but we aren’t counting either way – it was 120′ into a swampy area that neither Donna or I could see a non-watery path towards.
In the afternoon we went sailing the St Lucie River around Palm City, Stuart & Port Salerno aboard Jolly Mon Song the 34 foot “yacht” of Sandy and Paul. It was a 3 hour tour with a stop at Finz Waterfront Grille for lunch in the middle.
The evening was spent playing a variation of Oh Hell and watching JJ Abrams reboot of Star Trek in Blueray on the Tomlin’s ginormous flat panel TV.
While the turkey was cooking and some of the guests were boating, Donna and I headed into downtown Stuart to do a little Geocaching. There were very few people in most of the places in downtown, so it made it fun not having to look over our shoulders to make sure we weren’t muggled while signing logs. Our total take for the day was 7, we had done 2 earlier that were within walking distance of Sandy’s house and then five more in downtown.
My favorite hide was the one from the picture above, called Road To Victory, mainly because of the hide of the cache itself. The size was listed as a regular, which normally means an ammo can, but those are usually kind of hard to hide in an “urban” environment. So it was nice to find exactly that, an ammo can, that was hidden in plain sight, bolted to the back of a Jeep in front of a little military museum.
We arrived at our destination in Palm City by lunch time today. A slight mis-turn in the town Okeechobee and two trips to the local Publix put our mileage for Wednesday at 203 miles instead of the 160 Google maps advertises. This brings our total mileage from Aiken to Palm City at 958.
It rained pretty much the whole day so the closest we came to geocaching was a virtual one in Okeechobee, but it was coming down so hard that we did not even get out of the car to answer the questions. I’m not going to count it as a DNF.
We drove a whopping 76 miles today, to Winter Springs and back and we finally ran into the Florida we love to hate, 6 lanes of heavy traffic interrupted by traffic lights every 1/4 mile. We did find an alternative route back that involved a toll road (best two bucks we spent today) and a two lane back road. The trip over was to have a quick visit with the fellow who lived across the street from us in Aiken. Oliver was the neighborhood historian as he lived there from the beginning and made friends with everyone he met. Unfortunately a couple of years ago his family moved him down here to be close to them when he and his wife began to show their advanced age. He enjoyed our visit and we enjoyed brightening his day.
Did minimal geocaching today, striking out on the one that is actually only 350 feet from our room at the Lakeside Inn, but we did find the one that was in a park a short walk away.
This evening we walked into downtown Mt. Dora for dinner. Last night’s dinner at the dining room at the Inn was fantastic, but we were looking for something a little lighter. Donna wanted ravioli so we walked up the 5 blocks to a pizza place thinking that they might have something Italian as well. They did. but no ravioli, so we backed back down the hill looking for likely suspects. After dismissing a couple we ended up at the Frog & Monkey Pub. No ravioli, but they did have a small flat bread pizza that was the perfect size for us to split. Donna got a bottled water and I got some Pond Water – Guinness & Root Beer. Don’t laugh, it is actually pretty good.