Friends & Vacation Preps in Clermont, FL: Lake Louisa State Park

With a week left to go until VACATION (not that we were excited or anything), we had one final stop planned before getting the bus ready to put in storage for a few weeks.

And that was a visit to the Orlando area to catch up with some long time friends who live not too far from Disney.

Lake Louisa State Park – Clermont, FL

We’ve stayed at Lake Louisa State Park (our review) on prior visits to the area, and really enjoyed the park – and were thrilled to get a reservation for this visit. It’s located about 20 minutes from the entrance to Disney (convenient for our purposes) and has lots of shopping & dining around – but yet has a pleasant out in nature feel.

The sites are also quite spacious and well laid out, with hiking, biking, kayaking available. Basically, one of our favorite kinds of parks!

We coordinated with our buddies, and arranged to meet them at Epcot for the Food & Flower festival.

Melissa works for Disney, and is able to get a few friends in for free – which always makes visiting Disney pleasurable! Otherwise, the $100+ per day ticket fee is a bit extreme to just pop in for dinner.

One of the advantages however of being domiciled in Florida is that we are qualified to purchase annual passes to the area theme parks, which is a nice perk. On a future extended stay in Florida we might just try that out.

We had an enjoyable time catching up with Sterling & Melissa – who are some of the few friends from my pre-nomadic days we still have somewhat regular communication with.

We’ve enjoyed cruising with them and meeting up across the country as our mutual travels allow. It’s a friendship we treasure, as not all endure the transition from a local friendship to the variability a nomadic lifestyle.

Aside from enjoying Lake Louisa we also used the time to finalize preps for our upcoming trip – a little shopping for packable & warm cruising attire, and wrapping up any projects we could.

Melbourne, FL

My mom (our cruising companion for this upcoming adventure) lives in Melbourne – where I lived before I hit the road. So it’s another spot that is a bit like coming home.

We spent a couple days at a Passport America full hook-up park nearby to get the bus prepped for going into storage. We followed the checklist we created last summer with our buddies Peter & John of the RVgeeks.com on Leaving your RV Behind.

We made sure all perishables were taken care of, everything cleaned up nicely and the tanks all at their appropriate levels. We got Kiki to her cat-sitter in the area.

The trip also aligned nicely with the 100-day trial period of our Leesa mattress we purchased online back in January coming to an end.

While the mattress was significantly better than the Denver Mattress RV Eurotop Supreme (which caved too much under our weight) Lippert Components had sent us for review last summer- it wasn’t quite what was right for us. For these heavier framed side sleeper spooners (with a cat on top), it just felt too firm and left us waking up with numb limbs a bit too often.

Leesa was extremely easy to work with and arranged a charity pick-up to match our schedule (very RVer-friendly!) and a full refund showed up immediately.

If you like a firmer mattress that feels more like latex than memory foam, we can recommend Leesa even though it wasn’t quite right for us.

The mail order style mattresses (ie. Casper, Purple, Yoga Bed, Luxi, etc.) are so much easier to work with as an RVer than any mattress store experience we’ve had – with extended trials, and delivery & pick-up wherever we’re at.

We’ve ordered a Purple mattress to try next, which has been scheduled to meet us upon our return. We’re very thankful our RV came equipped with a platform for a standard Queen, and we don’t have too many concerns about weight (we’re a bus conversion with tons – literally – of excess cargo capacity) – giving us freedom to consider any mattress, not just oddball RV sizes.

Once we’ve settled on our ideal mattress long term, we’ll try to put together a dedicated post on mattresses for RVing, and our lessons over the years with a variety of setups and challenges.

What’s Next:

Assuming all goes as planned, we’ll be pulling into Montreal tomorrow morning after our New England & Canada cruise and enjoying a few days exploring the city before our return to Florida via rail.

We’re planning to stick around Melbourne a couple weeks to get caught up on life in general – Coverage? is due for an update, we have content to get created, video chats to host and mobile internet advising sessions to handle.

I’ll also be attempting to get established with a new primary care physician who seems nomad-compatible so far. It’s been a chore I’ve put off for way too long after my former doctor quit his practice – health care on the road is a bit tricky after all.