A Couple Road Trips in a Busy Fun Week – Part 1

Location: Avon Park, FL (High 54, Low 36)

We started out this week with a road trip over to Palmetto, which is a little over an hour and a half from our current location in Central Florida. With our thoughts about potentially “settling” part time somewhere on the west coast of Florida, we were considering finding a new winter spot in order to scout out communities where we might eventually want to buy a place.

(On a bit of a side note, we do plan to do some more traveling eventually, as opposed to staying the winter in Florida. However, right now it just doesn’t fit in the plan. We still travel back to Ohio and NY for a good part of the warmer months to spend some time with the grandkids and other family members, and do all the necessary medical stuff. Our fall seasons are taken up with work at Amazon. This seasonal work has made our fulltiming possible, since we hit the road with loans on both our truck and fiver. After three seasons of working, we have paid off our truck – yay! and now we have at least three more peak seasons before we will have the fiver loan gone. With our financial situation being what it is, it just makes more sense to stay put on the east coast for the winter months, and we want it to be somewhere warm! Which is why we have landed where we are.)

After extensive web searching, I had a list of seven possible rv resorts which seemed to fit the bill for what we were looking for. So this past Tuesday, we headed out for Palmetto to see what we could see…

 

In all, we went to five RV parks. They were all called “resorts” but most of them were a far cry from resorts in our book.

 

 

One of our biggest impressions that seemed to be a constant was tight roads and tight spaces.

 

 

They all felt the same. Pretty sharp corners. Small sites. Tight spots to back into.

 

And on top of all that, there was also one other constant in that they didn’t take reservations for a certain site. We could “request” a site, but they made no guarantees that you would get it. Which means nothing as far as I’m concerned. We could end up with them putting us in a really tight site and no plan B.

And….as if those concerns weren’t enough…none of the parks that looked like they might have sites that would work for us seemed to have activities geared for active younger type retirees.

The one bright spot in the day was a nice lunch in Palmetto at a little spot called the Riverside Cafe. It had outside deck seating which was enclosed at the time since it was a cool day.

 

 

We had a great view and the food was yummy!

 

 

This was my Cobb salad with grilled chicken.

 

 

After a full day of driving around looking at RV places in the Palmetto and Bradenton areas, we headed home full of indecision. Only one of the parks looked even remotely like something we would enjoy staying in. But we didn’t really care for the activities offered there. I still had a couple other RV resorts on my list, which we had left for another day, as they are down in the Ft. Myers area. But those were quite a bit more expensive.

 

And on the other hand we had…our current spot…lots of room…in a park we enjoy…

 

 

So, you can probably see where this is going...but after all that, and lots of conversation between Harry and me…we’ve decided to put the idea of trying another rv park on the back burner for the time being. We’re going to stay put at Adelaide Shores at least for another winter season, maybe two. For now we will explore other local communities just by doing day trips. We both feel good about our decision, so we know it is the right one.

And, as this post is already long enough for one day…the rest of our week shall be left for Part 2.