Getting closer to the border

An unexpected thing happened while we were staying at Manatee Hammock campground. We like the campground and really like the waterfront park. We spoke with a couple campers who had snowbirded there all winter and decided to check on availability for next year. The office gave us a list of sites available for the month of January 2016 and we walked to all of them. We picked a nice corner site and paid for the month before we left. The picture below is where we will be parked next January.

We still plan on spending time at O-TT and the keys. Thousand trails is a shoe-in as I have a 150 day advance reservation window with my membership but the keys will be a challenge. I’ll start calling the campgrounds next week for availability.

After booking our site for next year we departed Titusville and headed north on US1. Our destination is St Augustine some 100 miles distant. Our plan was to stay at the local Elks Lodge but their 6 RV sites are first come first served and all were occupied when we got there.

I called the closest campground, they had one spot left. I said I’ll be right there I’m right around the corner, just as I got there three RV’s pulled in the entrance ahead of me. I just drove on by and went to the next one. It is about 5 miles down the road and is a bare bones park which is basically parking in a field behind a flea market. It was also full so we drove on to the last campground in the area. They had space for one night which was all we wanted so we took it. 

On Friday morning we departed our overnight stop at Indian Forest Campground and drove west to the town of Green Cove Springs. Millie and I spend about ½ the year on the road and have our mail routed to a mail forwarding service in Green Cove Springs. They hold it until we request a delivery to wherever we happen to be at the time. We were going by on our way north and decided to stop and pick up our mail. In the picture below that is not a path. It is one of the interior roads that you have to navigate with your RV.

Afterwards we continued north to the beltway around Jacksonville and took it to the east and then went on to the ocean where we camped at a city park campground called Kathryn Abbey Hanna Park. The park is heavily vegetated with gnarly old oaks, towering palm trees and thick tropical underbrush. It could have been used in the making of the Jurassic Park movies.

From our campsite the ocean beach is a short walk of about ½ mile. The beach is wide and flat almost like our Myrtle Beach but the water is not as clean. I imagine this is because of Hanna Parks’s proximity to the mouth of the St Johns River. After setting up the motorhome at the campground we went the beach, soaked up the warm sunshine and watched the world go by.