Alligator Uber
History and Family
As we made our way south for the winter we made two stops to see family and to continue delving into Florida’s history in preparation for our upcoming Workamping position.
First up was St. Augustine and Jacksonville. Joanna’s brother, Skip, and his family live in Jacksonville so we split our time between the beach, family visits, and visiting the oldest city in the US, St. Augustine. Dinners out and watching the University of Florida football game outside at the coach made for a relaxing family visit. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see Paige or Madison as they were both out of town, Madison has started grad school in Chicago and Paige was helping her mom in Pensacola.
We also caught up with our RVing mentors, Chris and Cherie of Technomadia. When we saw they had
there boat in Jacksonville we emailed them to invite them to dinner to thank them for all they did for us prior to our going full-time. We had watched literally ALL of there videos during the years we prepared of our adventure and learned so much from them that we wanted to give back just a little to say thank you! It was wonderful to get to know this amazing couple who really were our inspiration.
We were camping right on the beach at the North Beach Camp Resort in St. Augustine so we had plenty of beach time, swimming, walking the beach, and moon gazing, The beach was especially nice in the evening after it had cooled down and we got to watched the harvest moon rise. We highly recommend this campground. The sites are quite large with lots of vegetation between them for privacy and it is a short walk across the road to the Atlantic ocean.
Our day in old town St. Augustine was a lesson in history! Since we only had one day we got on the Old Town Trolley and toured the city getting off at many sites along the route. We highly recommend taking the trolley, especially on hot days as you get to see most of the Old City without killing yourself walking in the heat. Between the pirates and the Spanish it is amazing the city has lasted for so long. We learned a lot about the time period we will be representing at Barberville and will be able to use this as background material in our presentations.
Next up we headed down to South Florida to visit Jonathan’s sister Sharron and her partner, Inez. We
love coming down to see them, Joanna cooks up a storm, which they truly appreciate, and Jonathan
helps around the house. This time they had just had a whole house standby generator put in and Jon helped them to understand how the darn thing works. Sharron is an amazing photographer and she is currently in several shows around the Ft. Lauderdale area. We even got to attend two gallery show openings!
We stayed close to the Everglades National Park at the Davie/Ft. Lauderdale KOA. It is an older park but very well cared for by the workampers. Though it was a bit of a drive back and forth to Chris’ (through terrible South Florida traffic), it was just a short drive to the Everglades. We spent one day driving Alligator Alley and one day at the Miccosukee Indian Village. We toured the village, watched a little alligator wrestling, and then took a ride on an air boat out to a hammock in the sawgrass lake.
We are now making preparations to head up to Barberville. We’ve read historical novels of the time period, studied our material from the museum, gotten Jon’s period attire ready (Joanna is still making hers!), and we have stopped at many living history museums over the last year, all in an effort to get ready to do the children’s programs at the museum. We are very excited about our upcoming adventure and can’t wait to get started.
We will be very busy getting set up and adjusting to our new positions over the next couple of weeks, but once we get settled and figure out exactly what we signed up for, we will get back to posting about our full-timing life!
Till then!