Day 69: Beach Bonus and Campfires

We started the day off with a short bike ride to explore the park. I took a turn a little sharp, and my foot slipped from my sandals bruising one of my toes. Nicholas now calls it my “COVID purple toe” and covers his mouth to ensure he doesn’t get COVID; he thinks he is hilarious.

Next up was four loads of laundry. The laundry process was a lengthy one because they only have two washers/dryers, and someone snuck in between my two wash cycles, so I got to wait for them to finish to get through all the loads. Fortunately, they were extra kind and sat there the entire time, which did benefit me when one of the kids forgot to hit start on the dryer. She noticed it a little later and did it for us.

Rob joined us for the afternoon break at the beach, which involved body boarding from a sandbar and a crazy number of biting flies on the beach (which for some reason were really attracted to our sand buckets). With no sewer hookup at our site, we did another dump station visit including showering all four of us while we were hooked up. This is the ideal scenario, because we leave the dump station all clean and with empty holding tanks. The boys like to put their jammies on after this kind of shower, so they were ready to relax at 4:30 p.m today, just in time for their end-of-day school calls.

Our site here is huge. We didn’t measure, but it’s at least 100′ long and 30′ wide. It even has great Wi-Fi, thanks to the directional antenna on our RV. Great Wi-Fi means very successful school meetings, which is always a win.

Tonight we had our first campfire since St. Augustine, 26 days ago. We went big and roasted hot dogs and did double s’mores. One s’more with Hershey’s chocolate and the other with a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

Once we got the boys in bed and reading their Kindles, we added more wood to the fire. When their lights were off for the night, Rob and I went out to enjoy chatting by the fire. I was in heaven; this is what I thought our trip would be like, but tonight was the first time it actually happened. There have been so many biting bugs or crazy weather that we haven’t been able to take advantage of some outside time after the kids went to bed. Fingers crossed we can get more of this time together on our trip!