Eight hours. We’re in charge now. On the road again. This is the last travel day for awhile. We got to drive off into a Florida foggy sunrise (picture).
Another quiet day. Good roads. Easy driving. Except the toll plazas. We spent the day on the Florida turnpike. The Florida turnpike is a toll road. We don’t have much experience with toll roads in Colorado. But, if they want to build a road, then charge me to drive on it, I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t have a problem with how much they charged me either. The toll plazas weren’t especially difficult to drive through, they were just often. They stopped us to charge us a toll eight times. Eight times we paid to drive on that road. It wasn’t that big a deal, but it seems in these high-tech days, this is an extremely low-tech way to collect a few quarters. OK. For a motorhome it’s more than a few quarters, but for cars, most of the toll stops collected seventy-five cents. I saw on one exit, in between toll plazas, that it cost another twenty-five cents to get off the tollway. Every car has to stop and pay another twenty-five cents. I would think for the fuel consumption and environmental inefficiency, they ought to just wave everyone through.
We end up talking to other people in campgrounds everywhere we go. In Texas, it costs seven dollars a night to stay in the campground on the beach, or you can just park on the beach for free. We have heard from other motorhomers that it is expensive to visit here in the winter. So far, it appears they’re right. You can save money at most campgrounds in other states if you’re willing to stay a month, by paying a monthly rate of three hundred dollars or so. We checked with the KOA here, and if you’re willing to commit to four months or more, you can stay for a monthly rate of fourteen hundred dollars.
This mobile hookup is so cool. I have a new cellphone hooked up to my laptop. It works almost every time. It didn’t work out in the middle of Kansas. It didn’t work down in the bottom of Oklahoma by a lake, but it has worked everywhere else. It even works way out here almost all the way to Key West.
I have another Florida sign to share. When you leave the rest stop, they remind you of several important things you might otherwise forget. They remind you to buckle up: “click it or ticket”. Don’t litter. Don’t drink and drive. And. Are you ready?…. Turn your wipers on when it’s raining. Really. It says that. Wait a minute! If my windshield wipers aren’t on, and it’s raining, what if I can’t see through the windshield to read the reminder? How will I know what to do?
This is from the people who also brought us “hanging chads”. I love Florida.
We took a walk tonight, and ended up at the campground marina. On the little island right across from the marina, maybe fifty feet away, is a giant tree, full of roosting pelicans. That works. A pelican tree.
We were here and set up by three pm. Another three hundred fifty miles today. We’re twenty miles from Key West. We’ve put two thousand five hundred fifty miles on the odometer. Wow! You drive a few hundred miles every day and next thing you know you’re twenty five hundred miles from home and there aren’t any roads left to drive on. Well, nowhere else to go from here, so I guess we’ll just have to stay awhile.
