We packed up the motorhome early on New Years Day and headed southwest to Pavo, Georgia, where Karyl Chastain and Ronnie Beal live. Karyl is the founder of, and currently runs, the Grieving Parents network on the computer. Shelley connects with this network almost daily, receiving and sending messages of understanding from other individuals who have lost children. We went west on I-16 and then south on I-75, turning off I-75 about 30 miles before the Florida border. The Beal’s have a large piece of property, and we were able to park the rig (and leave the next morning) without unhitching our tow car. What a pleasure! While Karyl is taking care of our Grieving Parents (and also Parents of Suicides) groups, Ronnie is into lots of projects. The major one is planting and tending to a garden of at least an acre….Karyl call most of the other minor projects, “just piddlin’ around.” Ronnie grows cane sugar, and presses it and bottles delicious cane syrup….he gave us a few bottles. The Beal’s also have an open air pavilion on their property, called the Butterfly Pavilion, to be used for meetings of Karyl’s various groups. In the rafters, individuals can write a small memorial to their children, and Shelley hesitatingly climbed a ladder to memorialize Amy.
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Karyl and Ronnie treated us to a delicious dinner (Ronnie’s homemade chili and black-eyed peas,Shelley’s first taste of them). After dinner, the four of us took a walk through Pavo, a small town of 700 (if you count some people more than once). We were treated to a walk through Ronnie's garden and then played a mean game of "Mad". Shelley, bless her heart (Karyl's special term of endearment, was losing consistently until the very last hand. Karyl, bless her heart, ended up the big loser!! We had lots of fun and lots of tears.
Ronnie made us an awesome breakfast of pancakes and bacon - it was a wonderful overnight for us.
Our next stop was back to Lazy Days (in suburban Tampa), where we had purchased our new rig. There were a number of things that needed o be done on the coach that couldn’t wait until our appointment on January 26 on the way leaving Florida. Patti Brightwell and Ronnie (a mechanic who works on Sundays) took care of almost all of our issues on Sunday afternoon, and we anticipated leaving reasonably early on Monday morning for Lake Worth. Just a brief comment on one particular thing that was taken care of on Sunday. The sofa bed on the motorhome has an air mattress, and when Shelley’s folks slept over, we discovered that the air mattress had a leak. When we mentioned this to Patti, she and Ronnie took our leaking air mattress out and ran around looking for another motorhome that had the same type and size of air mattress. They almost seemed like thieves, as they put the bad mattress into a pick up truck and were driving around, jumping in and out of other coaches looking for a match. We both were in hysterics as we watched the show, which took about ½ hour before they found an air mattress that fit.
As you might expect, the few remaining issues took half of the day on Monday, so we didn’t leave until after 1 PM. We decided to bypass the interstates, so we drove across Florida on highway 70. The trip was well over a hundred miles, and we drove past many acres of orange groves and cattle ranches. We also passed a number of game preserves that were open for hunting, including one that advertised wild boar. We were shocked to see the damage remaining from the fall hurricanes. There were downed trees everywhere. We arrive at John Prince Park in Lake Worth just as it got dark, so we quickly hooked up the coach. We then went over to Norm's mom's house, and since we were all starved, we went out for dinner at Rama’s a very good restaurant that specialized in Thai food.
We spent Tuesday and Wednesday with Mom running errands and taking care of the list of things to do that she had ready for us. We also spent some time at the campground just hanging out together. The rest of the week (Thursday and Friday) were reasonably quiet. We just spent late afternoon/ early evening with Mom and had the rest of the day to ourselves. Friday evening Mom took us to see the Tamburitzens, a group of Duquesne University studants that travels the country doing Eastern European folk singing and dancing. It was wonderful entertainment.
But Saturday was the big day. When we arrived in Lake Worth on Monday,1/3, we had no plans for Saturday. However we let the word out that that we were in the area, and the Chai wireless took over. We had 16 people over to our motorhome for a some munchies and soda. Besides Shelley and me and Mom, another family member, my cousin Todd Lewis came to visit. He is a full timer and also a Chai member. Among Chai members that we knew were Les and Willi House and George and Myrna Wolkoff. Then, new friends Alice and Bill Blotnick, Norma and Av Tennenbaum, Bob and Selma Keil, and Joel and Ellie Wishengrad also joined the fun. We had a wonderful time just gabbing with each other.
On Sunday, we went to visit the Houses and the Tennebaums at their RV resort in Westy Palm Beach. It was the first time that we had been to one of these, and it was quite beautiful. But, as with most Jewish get togethers, food was also important. Willi put together a delicious lunch, and we had ice cream in the community hall.
On Monday morning (1/10) we packed up the motorhome and headed south to Marathon, in the middle of the Florida Keys. This time, we were visiting Shelley's mom. We stayed at Knight's Key Campground, on the ocean side just before the 7 mile bridge. We were having trouble with the satellite TV dish, and when we arrived at Knight's Key, there was a DISH TV repairmen helping someone in the next site. Before we knew it, we had an appointment for him to come back on Wednesday with a portable dish and tripod that would allow us to set up manually. Why did we spend so much for the automatic one, especially since we couldn't get it to work? As fortune would have it, before we left Marathon we got the automatic one working, so know we have 2 satellite dishes. Maybe if the automatic one continues to work we'll sell or get rid of the portable one. It does take up a lot of space. We stayed in Knights Key until Thursday, and this was a reasonably relaxing time, although the weather was really hot and humid. In fact, for the first time, we used the air conditioning in our new motor home...and it worked. We hung out with Mom at her condo...Norm got to go for a swim and Shelley joined the older generation in a game of dominos.
On Thursday, the 13th of January, we had Mom over for breakfast and then it was time to hit the road again. We drove up Route 1 to get of the Keys and then, in a few miles, we got to our new campground, Larry and Penny Thompson Campground, in a Miami-Dade County Park. Some friendly neighbors helped us get our motorhome into the site, which was very narrow, and before we knew it, Norm's cousins, Fran and Barry Hesser and Todd Lewis came over. After some oohs and aahs at our new rig, we all piled into Fran and Barry's car and went out for a delicious sea food dinner. Friday and Saturday turned out to be miserable, with almost constant rain and showers, so we took care of some business, writing bills and going shopping and taking care of other errands. We did run into one minor problem. On the previous Monday we called our mail forwarding service and asked them to send our mail to general delivery at the post office zip code 33177, as that was the zip code of the campground. This has been our normal procedure since we were on the road. So, Friday morning we drove to the post office to pick up our mail and we were told that they don't accept general delivery at that post office. If they receive a general delivery package they either return it to the sender or forward it to a nearby post office that has general delivery. Well, we drove over to the nearby general delivery post office, and found that our mail wasn't there either. A call to our mail service revealed that they haven't received returned mail. So somewhere, there is a large package of "Topf Mail" floating around. If anyone gets there hands on it, they're welcome to pay the bills included. The weather was pretty gloomy on Saturday so we just hung out and took care of day-to day-business. Sunday morning was also grey, but we piled into the car and took an area tour given by Fran and Barry, with Todd coming along. We met at the Hesser home at 10 AM and the tour ended at 3 PM. The highlights were Little Havana, South Beach and Coconut Grove along with the Holocaust Memorial. South Beach was host to a Art Disco week-end, so we parked the car and walked along a street lined with booths on one side and small hotels with Art Disco fronts. We had lunch in a Cuban restaurant in front of one of these small hotels. It was delicious. On Monday, we drove to Shark Valley, a National Park on the Tamiani Trail (Route 41), about 15 miles west of the Miccosukee Indian casino. We stopped for lunch at Gator Park, and Norm as brave enough to try an alligator rail sandwich. Tasted much like chicken. We took a 2 hour tram ride through the everglades and saw about 150 alligators of all sizes, from less than one foot to over 13 feet long. We also got to vies swarms of birds, mostly, ibises, egrets, and anhingas. Surely a very special and really enjoyable day.
On Tuesday we drove about 250 miles northwest to Clermont, near Orlando. We passed through mile after mile of orange orchards and wondered about the number of illegal aliens it took to harvest this crop. We also saw large trailers full to the brim of oranges. Tropicana, here they come. We passed the shores of Lake Okochobee as Shelley took her first turn driving the new motorhome. Shortly before we arrived at our destination, we were both surprised to see a sign "Goat's Milk Fudge." Since neither of us were brave enough to try it, we passed on by at 65. We arrived at the Orlando CG of Thousand Trails. No sooner had we found our campsite (well, maybe 15 minutes later) three motorhoming friends showed up at our coach. Joe P, who, with his wife Susan had helped us move into our new motorhome at Lazy Days, rolled up on his bike. Susan was still on Long Island working while Joe was enjoying himself. And Glenda and Dave Wallace, who we had also met at Lazy Days were camped two sites away from us. The afternoon of the next three days was spent wining and noshing and gabbing. Not a bad thing! The mornings were spent getting our mail and dealing with business and getting our Florida drivers licenses.
