Sunday

Movin’ On. (After Carol Had Said A Fond Farewell To Our Little Alligator Which Had Spent The Weekend less than 50 Metres From Our Trailer)

[Please note: I am not at all concerned about Carol and the Alligator, at least no more than I am about Ron and the Frog, (who by the way Carol thinks is still ugly. {No we will not comment on which one})]

This morning we had a little jam session of our own with Sandy and Don, they were really interested to hear some of the British Folk music which Carol and Ron sang, they even recorded a bit of Carrick Fergus.

We then hitched up the wagon and set sail for West Palm Beach (not mixing my metaphors there at all). We were going to camp at John Prince Park again. I had thought that Arcadia was in the middle of nowhere, however driving across Florida on Route 70 showed me that it was actually only on the edge of nowhere. Route 70 is about 100 miles long and has about 6 bends and 4 towns. One which was of interest to me was called Brighton, unfortunately it was so small it had the towns name written on both sides of the sign. Passing through Okeechobee was like stepping back into a cowboy film. The main street had those shops with big fronts, but nothing behind them, there was an advert for a local Rodeo and you expected to see cattle being driven down the main street. Most people seemed to drive hitch posts and tie them to horses outside the saloons. Okeechobee is on the north shore of Lake Okeechobee (I think this is an old Indian name), which is big, really big, about 40 miles across, which is wider than the English Channel! (for those of you from Yorkshire, that is the bit of blue on the map that keeps us from speaking French). We wanted to see it, but unfortunately there was (sorry, is) a levee all round it which was too high for us to see over and there was nowhere we could stop with the Trailer on, so we still haven’t seen Lake Okeechobee!

Still we didn’t hang around and arrived at John Prince Park in good time. In good time to find out that the campground was closed! This meant that we had to rapidly rethink our itinery and move up to Jonathan Dickinson State Park, about 35 miles north. We arrived as the sun was setting, a beautiful orange sunset over the trees of the Park. Unfortunately the campground was 4 miles from the gates of the park, by the time we reached the campground it was nearly dark so we had to find a space very quickly, which we did, though I nearly drove the car and trailer into the forest as I tried to reverse the Trailer into a gap it wasn’t made for. Still we eventually managed it. We are safely set up, but we don’t know what awaits us at Jonathan Dickinson State Park, we haven’t even seen it in the daylight yet.