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Young @ Heart, Other Parts Are OldFeb 12, 2008
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The golf course across the fence, as we see it from our...
| From Torrey Oaks RV Resort, in Bowling Green, FL, 50 miles east of St. Petersburg. The weather has been so enjoyable down here the last several days, as we continue to hear about the cold temps & snow in much of the rest of the nation. It indeed has been very nice, requiring nothing more than shorts & tees day or night. We are supposed to have a cool front arriving later today with rains, lower temps & potentially some storms. The air already has a “hint of moisture” feeling in the air, for which I slipped-on a nylon wind breaker earlier this morning when I went out to walk & take some photos of the campground. The weather has been so nice that we have chosen to just enjoy it & not do much else the past several days. We did go over to Sebring last Wednesday to visit our friends Al & Marianne from Tennessee who have a vacation home there. They bought the Gold Wing when we sold it last spring. We had first met them when we started riding Gold Wings & explored joining GWRRA, the “Gold Wing club”. They were Directors of the local chapter & always made us feel very comfortable about being the newbies in the club & newby-riders. After visiting in their home to chat for awhile, they then took us to a small one-man Cuban diner in old downtown Sebring. Vicki & I ordered one Cuban sandwich & one roast beef sandwich & then split each of them. Even though they were large sandwiches, we did our best not to offend the chef. Al & Marianne, THANKS for your friendship & for a very enjoyable reunion. We did some shopping for another comforter for the bed while we were in Sebring. Neither of us have particularly liked the comforter that came on the bed. After looking & not finding anything for which we much cared priced under $100, we decided to pin a hundred-dollar bill onto the existing comforter & give ourselves a longer time to get to likening it. We watched all of the NASCAR racing from Daytona over the past weekend, & will almost certainly do so again this coming weekend……surely are enjoying that HD TV, especially the one in the patio wall!!!! Yesterday afternoon we got out & rode around in the area for awhile. This area is a bit remote from the metropolitan areas, being 30-50 miles from several larger towns…..just depends what direction you wish to go. The Gulf beach, St. Petersburg & Tampa are to the west; Bradenton & Sarasota are to the SW; Port Charlotte & Fort Myers are to the south; Sebring is to the east; Lakeland, Lake Wales, Bartow, & Winter Haven are to the north. Fortunately we have a WalMart SuperCenter here just a couple of miles away, & the town of Wauchula, a typical county-seat size town, is another couple of miles beyond the WalMart. The surrounding area is mostly agriculture, either cattle farming or citrus groves. We appear to be in the middle of the citrus harvest season, as we see some groves that look to be picked clean as a whistle while others are just loaded with fruit. We’ve seen lots of trucks hauling the fruit. These trucks are semis, with full length trailers that have wire mesh sidewalls reaching 4-5 feet. The fruit is loaded in bulk in the trailers, causing me to wonder how those oranges on the bottom avoid being totally squashed. There is a processing plant up the road a few miles that we have passed a couple of times. Each time that we do we see 15-20 trailers of fruit waiting to be unloaded. There is a grove that has not yet been harvested just across the road from the campground. I walked over last night & plucked a couple of oranges from the tree; just wanted to see what they tasted like straight from the tree. After chilling overnight, I ate one this morning…not bad, a bit tart, maybe not yet at the peak of ripeness, but a good taste, very juicy. Speaking of the campground, we have really enjoyed being here. It is a bit smaller than Pioneer, where we spent last January near Corpus Christi. The crowd has ranged, guessing, from 25-50% of capacity, peaking this past weekend. The campground is in transition, having been bought by Doug & Sherry last year. It is obvious that they have worked hard to make a lot of upgrades in preparation to sell-off individual campsites. We personally have no interest in owning a campsite (we can’t stay put long enough to justify it), but if we did, this would certainly be a candidate. Doug & Sherry are very hospitable hosts & owners, eager to please, the amenities are very nice, the social program for a park of this size is commendable, & the Saturday night covered-dish meals (for which Doug & Sherry provide the meat) are good enough to carry-over through the following week. Rather than idly rambling-on, I’ll let the photos do the talking about the park. As to the title of this entry, I have often been thankful that I have never had back problems of which I hear so many other people speak. At the moment, I’m wondering if that good fortune has come to an end. After hauling the boxes between the two motor homes during move-out & move-in, after doing all kinds of twists & bends for several days getting things positioned just right, I laid down on the floor beneath the steering wheel last Friday to tidy-up some wiring for my “driver’s aids” pictured in the last entry. I never felt anything amiss until I went to get up, when I felt some slight pain in my very lower back & hips. Since then, the discomfort has fluctuated from very severe to not so bad. Yesterday morning I was very uncomfortable, but by the afternoon was feeling much better. Thus far today, through noon or so, we are definitely giving yesterday a run for the money. I certainly hope that this is not going to be anything long-term or that requires serious treatment. At times I don’t know whether to laugh at myself for being so hesitant to move, or to cry because of the discomfort….so I do both!!!! When I manage to get myself near-vertical, it is not bad……but I’m sure that my routine to get there would rival Vaudeville for its humor. I’ve tried several remedies, but I think that my next treatment may be some exercise in the heated pool of the campground…….which makes me all the more glad that we are not sitting in a snow-covered state!!!! While I was out walking this morning, trying to loosen-up the back & taking photos, I saw a placard in the window of another motor home with the caption of this entry's title. As soon as I saw it, I knew how appropriate it was for me at the moment. My air-card went on the blink Friday. Fortunately the campground has free wi-fi that works well from the campsite. I spoke to AT&T yesterday in the midst of spending about half of two hours on Hold. Their tech had me go through several diagnostics before concluding that the device was dead & that they would send me a new one. This is the new air-card that we had bought in December for the new computer, because the new computer did not have the “credit card” slot that the old air-card was designed to use. Fortunately the new now-dead air-card was still under its one-year limited warranty. During the discussions yesterday, they talked an awfully lot about the exceptions to their warranty, almost like if it has ever seen the light of day then the warranty does not apply. We’ll see if this becomes a straight warranty swap-out, or if we have a fight on our hands. And that my friends is might-near all the news that I can think of. Make your day a good one. |
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