Day 51: Driving toward the Everglades

It was another drive day, headed to the Everglades! Our current schedule has us taking only six days to get from the Florida Keys to the panhandle, so we wanted to make the Everglades stop on the way down versus when we head back up. We are finding it takes two nights to give us even a day to explore an area, and that is usually in only two two-hour chunks of time working around the school/work schedule.

We started our drive day off with a stop at Dunkin’ Donuts. This morning Nicholas informed us he had to “dress up” for this stop. His “dress up” clothes were his Buc-ees tie die shirt and brown shorts.

Following donuts we stopped by the post office to get our ballots in the mail. We had a fairly lengthy discussion about voting and all the different measures and people on our ballots.

Thanks to Rob hitting the grocery store earlier, we only had to stop at Costco to stock up today. It is our last Costco stop for awhile, as they aren’t in the Keys. Items on our must-have list: peanut butter pretzels, Frosted Mini Wheats, ZBars, and the standard eggs, veggies and fruits. I am so used to the quantity at Costco with what our family can consume that I find I often under buy when at a grocery store so we have to make another stop more quickly.

Leaving Costco was a bit of a process. We were not able to find the nice, long parking spots, so the spot we did find required us to back up to get out. It was our longest “backing up dance” to date. We have learned after previous failed attempts that backing up with the tow car is super hard. Rob now gets inside the tow car and tries his best to keep the steering wheel straight and steering slightly to keep the car aligned. Today’s parking lot back up took probably close to 10 forward and backs cycles to move 100′ back so I could finally make the turn and get us going. We did do a final gas fill-up for both the RV and car before hitting the road again. Quick stats: the Motorhome has consumed 587 gallons of gas so far on the trip, getting an average of 7 MPG.

Side note: At the beginning of the trip my phone kept freezing while giving directions and I didn’t always notice so I missed a handful of turns resulting in some pretty tough turn around situations to get us heading back the right way. A software update has since fixed the problem, but not before getting us all pretty paranoid it might happen again.

We had another first today: after driving a bit more after the Costco stop, Rob headed to the back bed to take a nap while I drove the rest of the way. The boys were both super jealous and decided they had to have a nap too. The three of them rotated through taking naps a.k.a. “just resting my eyes for a minute” in our bed. Nicholas was probably the only one who really fell asleep. This kid hasn’t napped in years so it tells you how much he needed this.

There weren’t great camping options super-close to the Everglades, but we did find the Larry and Penny Thompson Campground in the far (really far) southwest portion of Miami. It’s a county park, with full hookups, and not too expensive.