Home Again, or As Close As We Get

Sun’N’Fun RV Resort, we have arrived! This place has been more our home in the past two years than any other address. For 7 months out of the last 24, we have had Sarasota, Florida as our home base, and starting today, we will be here for the next 6 months (except for a few weeks to visit our sons for Thanksgiving and to take a Caribbean cruise in February). We are in a new site this year, although not that far from our old one; actually, right next to it. Friends, who had it the last two years, sold their RV and moved into a vacation home here, so we inherited it. The advantages are it has more room and several trees (Geoff will put up his hammock as soon as possible). We found out the disadvantage right away; the trees block our automatic satellite dish on the top of the RV, so we will have to set up the manual dish. For now, the cable and antenna connections to our TiVo will have to suffice.

Tomorrow is Monday and our resort experience will start, although many of the activities we are involved in do not start for a few weeks. We need to get set up here. We need to get our high-speed internet, patio chairs out of storage, put a few things into storage, and start exercising. Let the fun begin!

(Times like this remind me of things my Mother would always say; when we would get back home after a trip, usually to Lansing to visit Grandma and our Cousins, she would frequently recite this ditty…”To market, to market, to buy a fat pig, home again, home again, jigitty jig.”)

32 States, 3 Canadian Provinces, 195 Days, 15,115 Miles Later…

We are back in our “home” state of Florida! We traveled south from Dothan, Alabama this afternoon and are on St. George Island near Apalachicola, FL. We’ll be here 4 nights enjoying the beaches and maybe even getting in some kayaking on St. George Sound.

Our Fall Synagogue Tour

Fall is a big holiday time for Jews and we have been trying our best to take it in, even with our traveling. We celebrated Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, in San Francisco, at Beth Israel Judea, where a camp friend of Ellyn’s is the Cantor. We got to Salt Lake City for Yom Kippur, and Ellyn was able to find Congregation Kol Ami, where they did not require a fee or even reciprocation from our own synagogue. We only did Kol Nidre as we were on the road the next day. We will have to atone for that next year.

We arrived in St. Louis, Missouri, where our good friends the Davidson’s live, and Joe was our Rabbi in Rochester, Miinesota. Now he is a part-time Rabbi there at Congregation B’nai Amoona and we were there for their celebration of Simcha Torah, when the reading of the Torah reaches its end and then restarts for the “Beginning”. Now, we are in Dothan, Alabama, where our own synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, with our good friend, Rabbi Lynn Goldsmith, was celebrating Shabbat, and a belated Simcha Torah. Ellyn got to light the Shabbat candles and Geoff got an Aliyah to the Torah.

From here, we finally get to Florida, although we have two more stops before we get to Sun’N’Fun.

Winter Approaching?

We’ve been parked for a few days in Des Moines, Iowa, while Ellyn is attending a quilting show and taking some classes (and buying some stuff). When we arrived here, the weather was quite warm, with highs reaching into the mid-80s. Nice shorts weather for Geoff. After two days of that, a cold front moved in from the North and the daily highs had dipped into the 50s. This morning we saw on the news that northern Minnesota had gotten its earliest snow on record. Getting too close for comfort. Time to head South.

On Saturday we head for Hannibal, Missouri, then on to St. Louis. Hopefully the cold weather will stay behind us.

The Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska

This is a wonderful place to spend an exhausting day. This zoo has hundreds of animals to see in a very nice facility, and the price was very reasonable for a full day of touring the grounds and a terrific IMAX video on butterflies. We went on a Monday and avoided the weekend crowds, even though there were lots of school groups there and Mothers with their little ones in tow. A couple of the large aviaries were closed on a week day but we still got to see a lot. They have a huge desert environment dome with lots of free flying birds and three separate desert environments inside. Then below the dome they have a whole nocturnal environment with animals which would not be active in the light of day.

Even while we ate lunch, we were able to observe animals in the jungle exhibit next door and a female White Handed Gibbon with twin babies. We wandered through a huge reptile exhibit and a wonderful aquarium before going to the IMAX show. After the show we went through the butterfly exhibit and Geoff ended up with one landing on this hat. We saw some animals we had already seen in Alaska in the wild but it was still a nice trip to the zoo.

This zoo has had a lot of births in the past two years. It seemed nearly every exhibit we visited had a sign indicating there had been a birth in 2012 or 2011.

We have actually been camped in Council Bluffs, Iowa while we were here and will be heading next to Des Moines, Iowa for a few days before heading toward St’ Louis, Missouri.