Monthly Archives: May 2009
Old Friends & Great Memories…
Titusville has a lot memories for both Jan and I, together and separately.
Jan’s father retired from the Air Force here in 1966 and I met her here in July of ’67.
There was a amusement park here then called Florida Wonderland. It had a Western town, with stagecoach rides and gunfights, and a carnival area with a lot of rides. Across the street on the Indian River, was their Marineland ‘wannabe’ with 2 porpoises, 2 manatees, an elephant seal, a giant tortoise, and a 13 ft alligator.
Jan was working as a saloon girl in the Miss Kitty’s soft drink saloon. I was spending the summer bumming around Florida and was hired to give tours and shows for the customers, and also take care of all the animals at the Marineland area.
I would see Jan when I went across the street to get ice and supplies. And 42 years later we’re still together.
And now both Jan’s mother and father, brother, and still-born niece are buried here.
Plus a few years after Jan had moved here in 1966, Carol and Joe Burkott, friends of hers from high school in Massachusetts, moved down here too.
And this is who we’re getting together with for lunch today. We hadn’t seen them in years, but we had kept in touch with Christmas cards, etc.
We’re meeting at Whistle Junction, a buffet chain restaurant here in Titusville. We only have today to spend some time together because they’re leaving for Brownsville, TX tomorrow to visit one of their kids.
After biding goodbye to Carol and Joe, we spent some time driving over to Cocoa Beach and Merritt Island and looking around. Even though it was pouring down rain, we still had a good time.
About 6 pm we had dinner at a Mexican restaurant called La Bamba II. Pretty good food, lousy service.
And then back to our Beauty…
On to Titusville…
We headed out of the RV park in West Palm Beach this morning about 10:30 am. Our first stop was about 8 miles away in Jupiter, FL.
I wanted to go ahead and fill up with Diesel at a Shell station we had scouted out a few days earlier. We do it this way because it’s easier for us.
We try not to wait to fill up while we’re on the road. When we have our toad (i.e. pickup truck) hitched behind us, we’re 61 ft long, longer than some tractor-trailer rigs and we’re pretty much restricted to fueling up at truckstops. But the truckstops are usually crowded and you often have to wait in line at the pumps. Plus the truckers seem to resent us getting in their way while they’re trying to make living. And I guess I don’t really blame them.
We don’t have to fill up very often. We have a 150 gallon tank that will take us over 1200 miles between fill ups. The last time we took on diesel was April 7th when we left Old Town, FL.
So what we do is when we’re parked somewhere and it’s about time to fill up, we start looking for gas stations that will work for us.
Of course, the first requirement is that station carry diesel. We also want a station that looks like it sells a lot of diesel. If diesel sets too long in the tank it starts to grow algae and pick up moisture. Both of these are very bad for your engine.
Next, we look for a place that we can get in and out off without too much trouble. This is made easier by the fact that we won’t yet have the our toad hooked up. We don’t want a place that we have to back out of or can’t turn around in.
Lastly, we try to find a place nearby we can park long enough to hook up our toad. This normally takes between 5 and 10 minutes.
The Shell station in Jupiter fit all of our criteria and $297.00 later (118 gallons at $2.499 per gallon) we were on our way to Titusville.
Since we had traveled this way before, sightseeing along US 1, we took I-95 north to save some time.
About 50 miles out of Titusville we started running into heavy rain, just what I really love when we park and it’s time to start hooking up our utilities.
Luckily the rain had almost completely stopped by the time we pulled into Manatee Hammock Campground in Titusville.
We had noticed this park several weeks ago when we drove up for the Shuttle launch and were happy to learn that it was a Passport America park which means we can stay here for 1/2 price, i.e. $15.00 per night.
We pulled in about 2:30 pm and got set up. This is a really pretty park.
Manatee Hammock Campground
I had seen the word ‘hammock’ used a lot in Florida and they didn’t seem to be talking about the one that hangs between two trees and you nap in.
It turns out that the word refers to the overhanging canopy of trees in an area. Which I guess it is kind of like the other hammock too.
More Later…
