March 1, 2020 ~ We spent the winter in Palmetto, FL at Tropic Isle Coop . Although the space between rigs was a little tight, we had great neighbors and I was sad when March 1st came around and our reservation was up. The Covid pandemic was all over the news, but life was still normal at that time. We planned a short stop near The Villages in central Florida to visit Scott’s cousin Donna and her husband Chuck. I am so glad we got to experience The Villages while they were in full swing. The restaurants were bustling and we drove Donna and Chuck’s golf carts to music in the crowded squares every night of the week! As you can see from the picture below, Covid was on our minds but we didn’t let it stop us from having a good time.
This might be a good place to give a shout out to Donna. Donna…without your gentle encouragement, and a lot of downtime due to Covid social distancing, I might never had started this blog. Thank you!
Our next reservation was at the Pelican Roost RV Park at Mayport Naval Station, in Jacksonville, FL. The campground is situated at the mouth of the St. Johns River where it enters the Gulf of Mexico. Interesting ships, from dredges to cargo ships to navy ships, pass right in front of the campground. Plus it is only a short walk to the beach from the campground. I will write more about Mayport Naval Station in a separate post.
We checked in at Mayport just in time for their ice cream social. We enjoyed our ice cream sitting with other campers in the lodge’s common area. What a great welcome! Plus, it was another indication that life was still pretty normal.
We had reservations at the Pelican Roost Campground for two weeks. In those two weeks, life went from normal to not normal. We went for one routine grocery shopping trip to the commissary to get food for the week. The next shopping trip found us stocking up for possible store closures. We went from eating out to eating in. Most distressingly, we went from having excitement for our summer plans to the realization that our summer travels probably would not happen. We had planned to head to Savannah, GA then Charleston, SC before going through the Blue Ridge mountains on our way to north of Chicago for a good chunk of the summer. In other words, we went from having a clear and exciting plan to having doubts and anxiety about our next move. We began to think we needed to formulate a plan of where to go to ride out what was increasingly becoming an unusual situation. While some full timers maintain a “sticks and bricks” somewhere, we do not have a house or property to fall back to.
The day before our reservations were up at Mayport, Scott inquired if we could extend them. We had thought it wouldn’t be such a bad place to ride out the storm if shutdowns did spool up. However, we were told there were no extensions. We had to move. Our reservations in Savannah, GA had not yet been cancelled so we could have gone there. We lived in Savannah for two years previously, and really wanted to go back to our favorite haunts. The news was all about closures at this point. We discussed how we didn’t really want to go to Savannah without being able to eat at our favorite restaurants or hang out at the Riverwalk and people watch . We also didn’t want to put ourselves in the position of being on the East Coast in a closing campground with nowhere to go. We though it best to face reality and cancel our summer reservations lest they be cancelled for us. We decided to head for the midwest where we have family. If we had to, we could put the fifth wheel in storage and move in with them. We have such great family on both sides!
Scott worked his computer magic and found us a likely route to southern Iowa, which is where he found the northernmost campground in Iowa with full hookups that was open for the season. Night time temperatures were still dipping below freezing and most campgrounds had not turned on their water yet. If we were going to stay put for a while, we wanted to be able to do laundry in the virus-free safety of our own rig so available water was important to us. We set our intermediate goal to Crossroads RV Park in Mt Pleasant, Iowa. Our final goal being northeast Iowa, closer to the Decorah area.
We normally try to limit the miles we drive each day to under 200 and we try to end our driving by 3pm at the latest. We usually schedule time in the drive to stop for a break and to stretch our legs. We also always plan to eat lunch in the rig instead of in a fast food restaurant. Because we were on a mission to reach southern Iowa, we packed our lunch with us in our vehicles and drove more miles than we like to in one day. That way, if we didn’t feel we needed to stop we could press on and reach that night’s campground earlier. Our route took us from Jacksonville, FL to Fort Rucker, AL to Cornersville, TN to Cape Girardeau, MO and finally to Mt Pleasant, IA. We passed over a lot of rivers and the most memorable part of the trip for me was noticing how many interesting bridges we crossed over.
After five days of driving, we reached Crossroads RV Park and settled in. I will do a separate post on our time there. Scott had been in contact with the full hook up campground in northeast Iowa that was closest to his sister, Deb, and her husband Gary. The campground was not yet open for the season because the manager was making her way back to Iowa from Florida where she spent the winter. After spending two weeks in Mt Pleasant, IA the Skip-A-Way Resort in Clermont, IA was ready to receive us. The manager, Terri, was very accommodating and allowed us to fill up our fresh water tank in the rig a few times while waiting for the danger of a hard freeze to pass and the opening of the water lines for the season.
So here we are. We have the site for a full season, although we can’t see enduring the winter cold and snow here. We are happily social distancing while riding our bikes and fishing in the many rivers that run through northeast Iowa. We count ourselves lucky to have secured a safe and fun place to wait out the pandemic while we ponder our future plans.