Since we sold our house and became full time RVers, our ‘home’ address has been at Sumter Oaks RV Park, an Escapees park in Bushnell, FL. Until this month, we had never stayed there!!

While we were in Savannah Candi got a jury duty summons. Since we are on the east coast and not too far from Florida, it made sense for her to go instead of trying to delay it.

So, we decided to spend a month at our ‘home’ park!! Funny thing we learned, we have been pronouncing it BushNELL for the last 6 years, it’s actually BUSHnell (kind of like bushel with an N)!

It’s a small, old park, with a really creepy swamp in the back, and a really BIG bird that walks around and squawks a lot. There isn’t much to do in the area, but we did spend a lot of time exploring this general area of Florida to look for a place to stay next winter. Oh, and Candi reported to jury duty but didn’t get picked for a jury, so she was out by 1:30!!

We visited Savannah about 10 years ago and stayed at Skidaway Island State Park. In our memory it was one of the most beautiful places we’d ever stayed, so, when the opportunity came up to Camp Host there we decided to take it! When we pulled in we were excited to find that it really is as beautiful as we remember. And our campsite is probably our favorite ever. We also get to work with some great people! The downside is that it’s much colder than we expected, which is reinforcing our thought system of always staying in warm weather!

The campground is about 12 miles from Savannah so we plan to spend a lot time visiting this quaint, historic town. Oh, and we found our “Friday night restaurant.” The Driftaway Cafe is about 6 miles from the park and has a great atmosphere and really good food (and it’s not too expensive!).

We spent a couple of weeks at Tranquility Lakes, a beautiful, brand new Encore Park. The park has a beautiful lake which lent itself to some stunning sunsets!

The highlight of the stay was visiting our friends, Scott and Chris, and seeing our Goddogs!! Of course, we caught a couple of Ravens games (and the team didn’t look bad!), and ate out a few times. We found a cute local distillery called Wicked Dolphin Rum and did some rum tastings.

We spent a relaxing week in Orlando and were planning on spending another, until hurricane Milton came along! These days there are so many tools available to make planning easier. We studied the various weather apps and news venues to see the possible hurricane paths. We used tools like RVTripWizard to plan routes, compared that to Google Maps, bounced those off of our Garmin RV GPS unit – and decided it best to move North/Northwest of Jacksonville to an area called Callahan. We picked a park called Kelly’s Countryside RV Park that turned out to be a great choice! We left in plenty of time to avoid the worst traffic and spent a few peaceful days waiting for the storm to pass.

The last photo is the day after. We had light wind and rain overnight and didn’t even lose power!

We finally made it to our first longer term stay in Florida at Thousand Trails Orlando. This is a really nice park with beautiful, brand new sites. We had planned to stay for two weeks, but that was before Hurricane Milton reared its ugly head. We did manage to watch a Raven’s game at Rock & Brews before we decided to bug out … typical Ravens, we won but it wasn’t pretty. The next day we headed North to escape the storm – more on that in the next post …

This is our first time back to Florida since we started this Full Time Rving life five years ago. So on our way south we had to stop by Welaka Lodge and Resort, the first campground we spent a season Workamping.

The park has new owners and most of the people that were there 5 years ago have moved on, but we did get to catch up with one of them. Unfortunately, the river front bar and grill we loved so much when we were there was closed for the day, so we went to Shrimp R Us, which is an easy walk and has a nice outdoor lounge area. Candi got a really good fish dish and Mike got an okay Shrimp Po Boy. It was fun reminiscing and we even ran into our first Workamping boss!!! Plus, we got to revisit Baja Taco, one of our all-time favorite Taco stands down in Crescent City.

Stayed our first night back in Florida at another Harvest Host, the Royal St. Augustine Golf Course. Golf Courses are always a little odd to us since we don’t golf, and this one didn’t have any kind of food service to get lunch. Still, it was a nice, quiet place to stay and we had a great time meeting up with Rusty and Joan, friends that we met in Denver when we were Workamping! We walked around downtown St Augustine a little and had a light dinner at The Floridian. Then we walked around some more and treated ourselves to a pastry at Le Macaron.