Our next stop after Gibraltar was Cartagena, Spain. Our tour of downtown took us to a historical excavation site of ancient Roman Ruins – we had no idea of the extent of the Roman Empire.
Afterwards who could resist a walk into town for some Spanish wine and tapas?
This was our first stop after crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Gibraltar was never high up on our list of places we wanted to see, but we’re so glad we did!
It’s a tiny city on a hill right at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. Although on the map it looks like part of Spain, it has always been a British territory. The few people we met while we were here are proud to be Brits and say it will always stay that way.
We took a tour of the Great Siege Tunnels dating back to the 1780’s when France and Spain tried to take the territory from the British.
After that we took a cable car to the Top of the Rock for what should have been amazing views … if not for the fog! We did get to see the famous macaques monkey’s.
Then into town on our own for some authentic British Fish and Chips! (And NO, we did NOT eat at Taco Bell! … but we had to get a picture.)
We love to cruise and decided to go on our longest one yet. A transatlantic crossing from Fort Lauderdale to Civitivecchia, Italy! The cruise was 15 days and 8 of them were sea days. We like visiting new places on a cruise and we also love the relaxing sea days, so it was the best of both worlds!
We really enjoyed the sea days. There was plenty to do on the ship, including a Steak Cooking class that Mike took and a wine tasting we both did. Since we both like to read we found some great places to spend some quality reading time. We also attended our first ever Silent Disco!
The food on board was amazing, both at the premium restaurants and the main dining rooms.
And the shows were incredible, including a hysterical version of The Liars Club!
We decided to head a little further south in Florida to do some exploring! We stayed at the Encore Miami/Everglades Park. It was a nice park with a good central location.
First we visited the Everglades and checked off another National Park. We’re glad we didn’t plan a special trip to see it, but it’s worth a day trip if you’re close by. So many alligators!!! Lunch at Joanie’s Blue Crab Cafe definitely made it worthwhile, a cute little place right in the middle of nowhere.
Next up we went to South Beach to see what all the fuss is about. We had a good lunch at the Boulevard Hotel then walked on the beach for a while.
Since we weren’t far from Key Largo we decided to head there for a day. We love the laid back energy of the Keys!!
On the way back North, we stopped at Faded Bistro and Beer Garden, another Harvest Host, and enjoyed a great dinner.
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 really fell in love with Savannah! It’s a beautiful, safe, walkable town. The downtown area has an ‘old city’ feeling that kept a lot of the historic nature with cobblestone streets, historic buildings, brick sidewalks, iron work, and oddly … a pile of snow (even though it was in the 50’s that day?!?!?).
One day we drove over to Tybee Island. This is a cute little touristy area but it was pretty quiet when we were there in November. We did get to play a little pinball after lunch at Rock House!!
We spent a lot of time on River Street checking out the restaurants, bars, and shops. Some of our favorites were Boar’s Head Grill and Tavern and the Wine Bar on the River. Many of the bars seem to have a prohibition era theme, like The Bootlegger.
We also took a day trip to Hilton Head Island and saw a great musician while eating lunch at Big Bamboo. Then we visited the Hilton Head Distillery, but sadly weren’t crazy about their rums.
In honor of Jimmy Carter’s passing, we had a drink at Pinky Masters where, legend has it, he stood on the bar to announce his candidacy for President!!
Another must see is the Wormsloe Historic Site with it’s “Mile of Oaks,” an approximately mile and a half long driveway lined with hundreds of majestic Live Oak Trees. They’ve stopped allowing motor vehicle access because, sadly, it was harming the health of the trees. The first image below we took 9 years ago in the Spring. The next two are in the Winter, but does illustrate the decline of the Spanish Moss present today.
Of course, no visit to Savannah is complete without visiting Forsythe Park.
Even though it was too cold for us, we loved spending Christmas time in Savannah. They started the season early with a boat parade which, being from Baltimore, we felt obligated to attend. It was okay but they got nothin’ on B’more!!
The Savannah City Market was done up beautifully with Christmas decorations. One of our favorite evenings was spent at The Treehouse listening to Kellen Powers and watching the festivities below.
One evening we drove to Tybee Island to the Tybee Post Theater to see The 1940’s Holiday Radio Show play. It was really cute and a lot of fun, and we learned a lot about old time radio!!
For Christmas Eve we treated ourselves to a ‘fancy’ dinner at Chive Sea Bar & Lounge. The food was excellent, the service was great and the atmosphere was fabulous.
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!