Friends, Nature Trails and an Alligator

Our final week in Florida was pretty full of activities.  We started the week off by attending a Cowboy Church in the area with our neighbors here in the RV park.  We met Bob and Jan while walking the dogs and hit it off with them right away.  They are fulltimers from Alabama and enjoy visiting and church.  Jan also enjoys doing things on her computer and provided us with our first social card.  Thanks Jan.

The idea is you can hand this out to people you meet who you want to stay in touch with instead of always writing it down when you need it.  We will surely stay in touch with them and see them down the road somewhere.  While we had never attended a cowboy church we really enjoyed it and plan on attending again next Sunday. 

  Bill received the convex mirror he ordered and installed it on Tuesday and everything is as good as new.  Just got to remember that when you are seated in front of the front tires, the front end of the motorhome swings wide when backing.  Maybe we can avoid more of these type of lessons.

  We had been told that the Peace River which runs through the Thousand Trails property has alligators and we were hoping to get to see one.  Well, that finally happened.  Bill took the dogs for a walk by the river one morning and was watching for one along the banks of the river.  Sure enough, it was just laying there.

 

It was probably only about 7 feet long nose to tail but it was impressive to us.  From that point on for the rest of the week, Bill would look for the Gator on every walk.  It was sort of like 'If you know where it is your OK' kind of thing.  It was there all week just lurking in the shadows, waiting for something to make a mistake so he could devour it.  At this point it is important to point out that one of the big activities people participate in here at the RV park is Shark tooth hunting.  Appearently this area was once covered by ocean, imagine that.  So the process is to make a wood frame with a screen stretched across it and attach those noodle floats to the edges.  Then they GET IN THE WATER, with the ALLIGATORS and screen for the shark teeth.

Now you can call me crazy, but I just think this shows a complete lack of respect for alligators, all for an old sharks tooth.  There must be a tooth fairy for sharks teeth that I am not aware of.

  On a different note, we never did get to see the Pioneer Museum that we intended on going to.  On Wednesday we did go to see it, 3 times.  From 11:30 to 1:45pm there was a sign on the door that said they were at lunch so we finally gave up.

  We did see one more interesting flowering bush while on our walks.



 

On Thursday, we had Bob and Jan over for a Brisket dinner and Jan brought Potato salad, homemade Pecan Pie and a game called Farkel.  We enjoyed our time together and the food was great but that Pecan Pie was FANTASTIC.  One of the nice things Jan does for people they meet is to introduce them to the game Farkel and give them the dice and a laminated score sheet with instructions..  It is a dice game with everyone trying to reach 10,000 points first.  We had a real good time.

  On Sunday we started our preparations for leaving the Peace River area and our trip out of Florida.  We will be headed for Alabama with a short stop in Georgia.  More on that in our next blog.