Florida - Day 3 - in Jacksonville, the campground, and Glen St. Mary

Flamingo Lake RV Resort, Jacksonville

Friday, 23 through Tuesday, 27 December 2022

The critters

David and Anna came in mid-day on Friday, and Dexter was as usual beside himself to see Anna.  Well, I was glad to see her too, but he was shaking with delight.

These are photos from when we visited them in Dallas a couple of weeks ago.

One happy puppy.  And one generous sister-in-law.

They'd both seen the kittens during the 2 days we stayed at their house a couple of weeks before, but just barely because they didn't want to come out of hiding.

Now I saw once again that the kittens refused to show themselves when David and Anna first visited the RV.  They ran and hid.  And I realized for the first time that they've spent most of their lives (all 3½ months of them) having only me and Dexter and Lily around.  Sure, we've made a few forays to vets' offices, but they were short trips and the kitties mostly stayed in their carrying case.  Yet here were these 2 adult people invading their small home territory, and it apparently filled them with fear.

Lily, on the other hand, knew them well and came out of wherever she was hiding from the kittens to welcome them.  Her example may have been the reason that after a little while, Bucky showed himself, though at a distance.

I have a couple of photos I took during that time.  You can see they're getting bigger, but they still act like kittens.

Bucky especially (he's the one close to Lily) always drinks
water from the far side of the bowl, draped over it like this.
Though Lily's bigger and older, she never tries to horn in
on situations like this - I don't know why not.

That's my jacket they're lying on, which teaches me a 
lesson not to leave my stuff lying around, because I
may have trouble getting it back.  That's Bucky in the
foreground.

Jacksonville

One day I went with David and Anna on a small tour of downtown Jacksonville, specifically aiming for an old tree that's been protected there.  It was called the Treaty Oak, but that name turned out to be a ploy by a journalist to gain public support to protect this very old tree that developers were planning to cut down.  Here's what the tree looks like today.

All of that is one tree - I couldn't even get it all in the photo.

Here's more of it.

This is how one side of it spread out.

A view of how the branches spread out from the trunk.

I'm including this one for perspective - that's my brother 
on one side of the boardwalk underneath the tree.

Here's the story of how the tree came to be protected.

And this is a plug for Jacksonville's commitment to trees, a cause I'm glad to support.

And finally, there's this inspiring message from one of the city's activists.

We had some trouble finding the tree, first, and then finding a place to park, even though we were in an actual car - David's that they drove from their home.  But he found a couple of spots at the park's entrance, where a homeless person sat, entirely covered in blankets.  It was really cold that day and the wind was blowing, so the wind chill was surely hovering around freezing.  Just as we were leaving, someone pulled up to deliver a meal to that person - and to other street people we saw about a block away.  What a hard life that must be.

We were driving around that area looking for something that I can't remember what now, and we happened on a sculpture that Anna took a photo of for me.

"Stilt Walkers"

For some reason, I can't find anything more online about it than the name.  But it looks really happy, I think.

We drove back north of town to a Winn-Dixie not too far from the RV park - as David explained, it was a day ending with "y" so he needed to get groceries.  

The campground

The cabin they rented at the RV park was almost a tiny house, with a living room/kitchen, a bedroom and a bathroom.  They brought inside the table that had been outside on the porch/deck, because it wasn't exactly sitting-outside weather and there wasn't any other table there.  Unlike some of the cabins there, the one my family had was right on the lake - Flamingo Lake - so they had a nice view after dark of the Christmas lights the RV park and various RVers had put up.

Dext and I walked around the lake twice - the first time with Anna and David, and the second time by ourselves when they were spending the day at the beach.  It's not large - .7 miles around - but when we made the walk we found the one dog park they had.  We found several dogs that were willing to make friends with Dext, so he got to run around a little with them and sniff some new things.

I hated to miss the trip to the beach, but I'm still feeling under the weather, not getting enough sleep and having digestive trouble.  Instead, I filled up with propane which we were running low on because of the cold weather, drove the RV around the little lake (to shake up the contents of my waste tanks), and then dumped the waste tanks.  And I cleaned the windows so Lily and the kitties could have a better view.

Anna brought back an amazing assortment of sea shells from their trip to Atlantic Beach - shells that we don't see on Texas beaches.  Which makes sense, I guess, since Atlantic Beach is on the Atlantic Ocean, while Texas beaches are on the much less volatile (except during hurricane season) Gulf of Mexico.  There are something like 5 separate beaches near Jacksonville, and I'll have to plan to visit one of them before I leave the state.

We had a nice little Christmas - David, Anna, Dexter and I.  Anna had brought lots of Christmas decorations and put up a little tree decorated with lots and lots of flamingo ornaments.  She really has a knack for transforming a space.  David cooked a ham and Anna brought some great side dishes and her mincemeat pie, which she and I like a lot.  For breakfast Christmas morning I made Momma's coffee cake, as I do every year because she did every year and it tastes like Christmas to me.  In the afternoon I brought Lily over to the cabin for a while to give her a break from the relentlessness of the kittens.  They're fine when they're asleep, but when they wake up it's just nonstop energy.  Lily's 15, and while she seems to be getting used to them and even watches their antics sometimes, I'm sure she often finds them overwhelming.

Extended family

One afternoon, David (at my urging) drove us all in the RV out to our cousin Karen's house in the country.  I knew we'd be gone for some hours and needed to have the RV with me so I'd be able to feed all the critters at dinnertime - not to mention my fear that if I'd just left them at the RV park Dext would end up barking a lot.  He does that sometimes in parking lots when he doesn't want me to leave him behind.  I wanted David to drive because I knew it'd be dark before we came back and I really didn't want to drive the RV in Florida's traffic at night, and he agreed to do it.

Interestingly, with this extended contact, the kittens were somewhat willing to come out of hiding.  Not to the extent of asking to be patted or anything that close up, but during the drive Jimmy slept in the open space in the console between the front seats, where David and Anna were sitting.

Karen and her husband Bobby were teachers for decades, and have only just this year retired.  One of their sons told Karen he figured he'd retire himself before she did.  I think it was an adjustment for them, but now they're discovering some of the joys of free time that others of us retirees have found.  I loved my job and wish I could have kept doing it, but I like being able to make my own decisions for how I spend my time.

Anyway, we had a nice dinner with them and their 2 sons and their wives and children.  Karen's told me she's glad when people from her side of the family visit because her kids had known only Bobby's side the whole time they were growing up.  And we enjoy seeing how the family genes play out in new generations.  Aside from the fact that they're all really nice people and a pleasure to spend time with - I'm glad to be related to people like that.

In sum

This was a nice campground, and it had its share of oddities (e.g. only one dog park for hundreds of RVers, and it's way out of the way for most), it was comfortable.  I was very glad for the chance to spend time with my family, though it was a shame that the temperature stayed low for most of the time, compounded with a strong breeze much of the time.  Winter, after all, but we'd hoped for a more tropical version of it.

Having this period of non-travel actually confirmed my need to take the rest period I've booked after this in Starke, north of Gainesville.  My body is being slow to get well and my brain seems to have become just about as dysfunctional as my body.  I need some rest-and-regroup time for sure, and I'm glad I decided to give it to myself.