Marching On

The month of March found us mostly staying put in Melbourne, FL to be close to my parents.

Aside from seemingly endless doctors appointments and treatments; we managed a lot of chill quality family time, catching up on work & projects, exploring the area and some social time.  My brother and his girlfriend were able to come out for a visit, which was marvelous.

Brevard Attractions

As we wrote about in a previous post, we took the opportunity to explore some of the local attractions around Melbourne.

We spent an afternoon at a spring training game at the Space Coast Stadium, between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Washington Nationals – and we had a ball (pun intended).

We ran in a 5k/10k adventure charity run at Forever Florida – an eco aerial center between Melbourne and Kissimmee. We definitely want to return here, as they just opened up the first zip line roller coaster in the US!

And we attended a charming rendition of musical The Drowsy Chaperon at the Melbourne Civic Theatre.

We enjoyed some hiking at the nearby Malabar Scrub Sanctuary.

Bus & Tech Projects

While still, we tackled a couple of bus projects.

• Obviously, we completed our sink install.
• Chris hooked up the bus’ large 220 amp inverter to our Lithium Ion Battery bank & inverter so that we can charge while under way (and run one of our air conditioners)

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• And we installed a high-tech fuel gauge (the number tells the driver when to start looking for fuel).
• We updated our off-site back-ups to leave behind with my parents.

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• We received a new WifiRanger Pro and Sky from the great folks at WiFiRanger to beta test for them – we’ll have reports up on our findings. These gadgets help RVers boost WiFi signals (such as from a campground, host’s home or public hotspot). This came in quite handy during our Melbourne stay, as the campground only allowed us to use one MAC address. With WFR, we were able to use that, boost the hotspot signal and then re-broadcast the signal inside the bus to all our devices.  It also can route our cellular data signals too – making this a quite promising device for us.

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• We upgraded one of our iPad 2’s to the ‘new’ iPad (we went the Verizon model.. see our post about choosing a 4G network for why).

Social Time

Melbourne also seemed to attract some other visitors to the area, who we were able to converge with.  We greatly appreciated the social breaks.

My dear and long time friend Barb, former sailing nomad and awesome jeweler (who made our commitment rings) took a diversion from her Disney vacation for an afternoon with us.

Long time reader and future technomad, Bob, was out visiting family and spent an afternoon with us hanging out in the bus to geek out.

And Charon and her beloved were in town for a guest appearance at a local tattoo shop, so we were able to get a second casual visit in with these amazing fellow Airstreaming, sword swallowing, tattooing nomads.

Cedar Key

We received some promising news on my dad’s health – although there’s still a lot ahead for him.  Feeling quite relieved & blessed, our monthly site up for renewal and being quite ready for some re-charge after 3 very intense months for our family – we decided it was a good time to meander.

We were also craving more extended social time with peers.  With a convergence of NuRVers seeming to spontaneously happen – we set our sights to Cedar Key, FL.

It’s been on our list of places to visit for a while, and now we know why.  We are loving it here.

We’ve joined up with some other awesome RVers – Jeanette & Dennis of Cheddar Yedi, Maria & Brian of The Roaming Pint (by the way, check out this fun interview they recently did with us about beer travels) and Debby & Bill of the Kassons Wild Ride.  We’re also next to the Low-Key Hideaway, where RVing nomads Cindy & Pat of Every Miles a Memory have been hosting for a few years now.

And almost as soon as we announced our arrival, we started having more friends and fellow-nomads decide to head our way too. We’ve gone from relative social starvation to saturation in no time flat.

Our Facebook followers have been tormented with photos of time here, but we’ll do an appropriate wrap up post later. We still have several days left on our planned stay.

What’s Next?

Next week well head south back to Spring Hill for Easter with Chris’s parents before they end their winter snow birding season.

After that. We haven’t a clue.  We’re still playing things by ear, and probably won’t want to venture more than a day or two’s drive away from my parents for a while.

Which works well for us – we just agreed to take on a custom iPad development contract, so we’ll be looking to find a balance that gives us lots of focused work time over the coming months.   We’re contemplating everything from finding someplace scenic in Florida to plop down at for a bit (perhaps back to Cedar Key??) to venturing further away.  A visit to Austin to be near my brother and then up to St. Louis in June is also a possibility.

We don’t generally plan more than a week or so out.