Trip07

Saturday.

Ten hours. Maybe we’re all caught up on our sleep now. It was so easy to get up this morning.

An uneventful day. We stopped once for lunch and a run. That was it. The next stop, it was three thirty, and three hundred fifty miles were gone. Fast roads and easy driving. We’re still in Florida, but we’ve turned south again. The weather is getting nicer. I got to run in just a T shirt today. Wait. I didn’t mean… OK. I didn’t have to wear a sweatshirt. How can I phrase this in the positive without describing everything I was wearing? I got to run in just a T shirt today. And I wore everything else you would normally expect someone running to wear.

We like Florida state parks (picture). But not all of them accept pets. We got a list of which parks are pet friendly. But even the pet friendly parks require a current shot record. Of course we didn’t bring a current shot record for each pet, but we discovered this on a Friday, so Judy called our Vet and they faxed the critical info ahead to the state park. The state park made a copy for us, and we’re set for the rest of the trip, as long as we don’t try to stay at the wrong state parks.

The pets have been great companions. Annie has gone into her giant brown sleeping caterpillar routine in Judy’s lap. Rags the cat struggles a little with the motion of the motorhome at first. He hides under the couch and drools, so we give him drugs. When the drugs kick in, he just goes to sleep in the chair and he’s fine. The second day, he doesn’t usually have any problem, but this trip he needed drugs again the second day. The third day, he was fine. He was running around looking out the windows, looking perfectly comfortable, until he jumped up on the dash board in front of me, looked up, and drooled. I think he’s become a seeker. He’s a user. We figured out how to get him to stop drooling. Now we have to figure out how to get him to kick the kitty drugs.

He stayed pretty smashed on the drugs during the day, but after we started to wean him from them, there was a surprise reaction. Rags has never been a particularly demonstrative cat. He wants to be wherever you are, but he wouldn’t want you to think he actually cares. It’s not like he wants to get picked up and petted. Well, what happened after we drugged him in the mornings was that by the evenings, we had a cat that was only slightly stoned, discovering that he really, really, really, really, really loves us. I mean he REALLY loves us. He loves us so much; there is just no way to get enough of us. No way to get close enough to us. We finally had to give up and lock him in the dog’s crate for the night so we could get some sleep.

A three hundred fifty mile day. This sets us up for one more three hundred fifty mile day. Then there are no more miles to go. We’ll be at the southernmost KOA in the US, twenty miles from Key West. We even called ahead for reservations to make sure we had a place to stay. We can spend a couple days there while we look around and see if we want to continue to stay there, or if we want to move to someplace else. This doesn’t look like a rustic KOA in the book. It looks very nice. It has its own beach and its own marina. It is priced like it is nice. We reserved a beachfront site.