Day 30 – Brrrrrr! 30 degrees at 7 a.m. but once it warms up it’ll be great – sunny and clear out. Rob walked to the photography blind at the pond, took some pictures, and his coffee kept him warm. He set up the screened tent for us to use when it warms up.
Since it’s cold and we didn’t want to sit around waiting for it to warm up, we decided to drive down to Florida – Green Cove Springs, a city below Jacksonville – to get our mail. Because the post office will only hold your mail for one month, we’d looked online to see what other people do when they’re gone for months at a time and not staying in one place for any length of time. There are mail forwarding services which assign you a new address, a box within their facility, and the post office forwards your first & second class mail to that address (no junk mail – YAAAA). The mail forwarding service receives the mail, and scans the envelope to your e-mail address so you, the customer, can decide if you want them to shred, hold, forward to you, or return the mail. If it appears it’s something important that you need right away (i.e., jury duty summons, absentee voting, tax documents) or if you are unsure whether the mail inside the envelope you’ve seen is important, you can opt to have them open and scan the inside contents; then you can look at that piece of mail and decide whether you want it forwarded to you some place where you can pick it up (general delivery at the post office where you are or to the people you are visiting, etc.). At any time you’d like, the mail you designated for them to “hold” can be forwarded to you at the address you give them, also. There’s a fee for all of this, of course, but it’s a great way to handle the mail situation if you’ll be gone any length of time without the ability to receive daily mail.
It took us about 3-1/2 hours to get our mail and return. The pace and amount of traffic seemed to pick up immediately upon entering Florida. We stopped at a park and had lunch. Beautiful osprey flew overhead, close, but we didn’t have the camera with us. Note to self – always have the camera handy – you never know! High 60 degrees, sunny, windy. On the way back we went into St. Mary’s, the city closest to our campground, to scope out where the grocery store was and where to do laundry. The next two places we stay will be inland and not near bigger towns, so we need to get this done before we leave here. No Jersey Mike’s, only a Subway.
In St. Mary’s we noticed a thumping noise coming from the rear of our Honda. Not a good sign. As soon as we got back to our campsite and got out of the car, we were bombarded by bugs – the return of the no-see-ums, and more ferocious than before. Not a single bug yesterday and now there’s tons. We’d planned to hike and bike today, but now it’s not looking too promising. Rob covered himself with bug spray and went out to check out the car problem. I sat inside and opened our mail; dealt with that. Got to read the TV Guides which had come in; we haven’t watched TV in over a month. Rather not know what’s going on!
Luckily, Rob found the problem with the Honda wasn’t serious and he could fix it himself. A bent disc brake shield which was easily bent back into position. We’d opened the windows in the RV when we got back and soon discovered the no-see-ums came right into the RV thru the screens. Rob’s big chore for tomorrow may be changing the screens out to special, smaller mesh screens; the bugs are only going to be getting worse from here on. We don’t want to sit with the windows closed all the time, especially not as the weather warms.
Made enchiladas, sat inside and read our books with the windows closed, and off to bed. Maybe tomorrow we can take that walk and that bike ride…….
the map finally works for me: yeah !!! So when do you do “maintenance” on the RV?? because isn’t that a lot of miles or it does not need oil changes like cars?? And where do you go to get work done on such a monster???
We’ll be going between 4K and 5K miles on this trip, so I will change the oil when we get home. I can do that myself, even on the road if necessary. If something major comes up, we take the RV to our dealer in CT. On the road, we would have to go to a hopefully nearby Winnebago service facility. That hasn’t happened yet thankfully! We do have an extended warranty that should help pay for anything that goes wrong.