Bouncing Around Central Florida

After our re-charging stay at the gorgeous Sertoma Youth Ranch, it was time to do what we came to Florida for – spend time with family.

We had hoped to get in more family time this winter, but many things conspired to make that not happen as much. In particular, Chris’ parents ended up rather spontaneously buying a new house in their retirement community in Spring Hill – which required a complete remodeling that took most of their focus.

While we had originally intended Cedar Key to be our winter basecamp to arrange multiple visits, that really didn’t manifest except for the holidays. Of course, our social and work life kept us pretty cemented in Cedar Key anyway.

So, Spring Hill would be our next stop to get a few days in with them.

Their new house is now re-modeled, and it’s absolutely gorgeous – it’ll be a fine Florida homebase for them. We helped out with wrapping up some house projects for them, got in some quality time catching up and did our best to balance that with still putting in continued long work hours.

We’ve now visited Spring Hill several times over the past couple years since they started wintering in Florida – and we’ve yet to find our own groove. While there’s several RV Parks in the area, none of them are quite our style.

So on this visit, we went back to Barrington Hills RV Resort (our full review), a park in the Encore system. It’s really kinda dull by our standards, and mostly a mobile home park. But, they honor Passport America and we can book it online – so it met the needs of a cheap place to park nearby.

After our visit with his folks, it was time to move on over to Melbourne to be near my mom for a bit and help her out with several projects –  many involving wrapping up my dad’s affairs.

The whole relocation from Cedar Key progression was feeling very familiar to last year as we moved over to spend his last days together.

So instead of going straight over to Melbourne, we decided to mix in something different.

I found a spot at Lake Louisa State Park (our full review) in Clermont available for 2 days, and snagged it.  We generally love Florida State Parks, but this one just didn’t have the same charm as others we’ve visited.

But that worked out fine, as our time in Clermont quickly became socially overbooked and we were hardly there. For starters, we have dear friends who live in the area that we wanted to catch up with. And then we discovered our RVing friends Forrest and Mary were down the road at the Orlando Thousand Trails park, so we booked up a dinner date with them – we always love time with those two.

And then we discovered that the Traveling Travaglinos were also at Thousand Trails, so we reached out to meetup.

They run the Fulltime Families community, which provides a lot of services & resources to RVing families. It was good to meet Kimberly after years of cyberstalking each other.

We did get to make use of Lake Louisa’s trails for a morning walk, and exercised our multi tasking abilities to handle work related Skype calls while hiking around one of the many lakes in the park.

After a way too busy schedule, our 2 nights were quickly consumed and we made the final drive over to Melbourne. We’ll be here for a week spending time with my mom and catching up with friends in the area.

And again, juggling lots of work hours for that secret project we’re so excited about.

What’s Next? At present time, it’s looking likely that we’ll head up to the Savannah area mid week to spend some time with dear friends in the area. And then we’re contemplating popping over to Perry, GA for the big FMCA Rally on March 17th. We’ve never been to a big RV-centric rally, and several of our friends are going – so why not?

After that, we’ll be looking for some much needed slower pace of everything as we do a slow roll up to St. Louis. Suggestions of some nice parks we can stop at to recharge our introverted homebodied selves at would be much appreciated.