Today was our last full day in Florida, probably for quite some time.  We arrived on December 22, 2013 and the bus and I have not been out of the state since then.  Linda flew back to Michigan in late February, to take care of year-end bakery business and family tax returns, and returned to Florida three weeks later.

We have thoroughly enjoyed our time here and will certainly return someday.  Florida is a large/diverse state and we did not get to visit and explore all of it during our first snowbird experience.  But we do not live here and the time has finally come to head home.  It won’t be a mad dash, however, as we plan stop three times and stay two nights at each of the first two stops.  Our final stop will only be a few hours from home.  This will allow us to dump our waste tanks before we leave and arrive home around mid-day with them empty, ready for our next trip on May 10th to the SKP Escapade in Goshen, IN.

Linda did a little more research on possible overnight stops and we settled on Northgate RV Travel Park.  The first night we were at Live Oak Landing our neighbor recommended Northgate as a great stopover spot for one or two nights.  It is right off exit 354 on I-65 near Athens in northern Alabama and is a good day’s driving distance from our RV park in Florida.  It is not far from the Tennessee border and is convenient to Huntsville, Alabama which has several interesting things to do if we so choose.  $25/night.  Linda called and made the reservation.

The rain finally quit around mid-afternoon so we grabbed the dirty clothes and did a load of laundry.  There is only one washer and dryer for the 72 RV sites here at Live Oak Landing, a much smaller ratio than we had at Williston Crossings, so it is literally first come, first served.  As it turned out no one else seemed interested in using the machines.  A number of rigs pulled in yesterday while were in Pensacola, and quite a few more pulled in today.  By dinner time the park was almost full and we suspect it will be completely full tomorrow night.  This is Easter weekend, and many schools are out if session for the week following, so families have their first chance of the year to go camping.  Many of the new arrivals had fishing boats in tow.  This was a “fish camp” before RVC Outdoor Destinations bought it and fixed it up.  It has great access to the Choctawhatchee River and Bay, so you can get to fresh water and salt water fishing from here.

I decided it was time to change the way membership was controlled in three RVillage groups I created:   FMCA FTH (Freethinkers), FMCA GLCC (Great Lakes Converted Coaches), and Converted Coach Owners (CCO).  My intent was for these groups to be “private” in the sense that RVillage group membership would be restricted to RVillage members who were already members of the corresponding outside groups, respectively.  My limited understanding of RVillage at the time led me to set up these groups so they were not visible in the main GROUPS tab and could not be searched.  My logic was that you could not join what you did know existed, but that led to unanticipated complications.

Because the groups were not visible I had to “invite” RVillage members to join.  That’s when I discovered that I could only send invitations to RVillage members with whom I had a “friend connection.”  Hummm.  I figured the most practical way to make this work was to provide directions to the members of each of these groups telling them to:  1) join RVillage; 2) find our profile; 3) send us a friend request; 4) I would accept their friend request; 5) I would send them an invitation to join the group, and finally; 6) they would accept the invitation and be members of the group.

It seemed easy enough at the time but was complicated and awkward from the beginning.  Very few people were willing/able to follow the required steps, but I was unaware of any other way to accomplish my aim.  I think the “friend” thing probably put some of them off (a bit too much like FB perhaps).  Then two things happened:  1) someone joined one of the groups without me sending them an invitation, and; 2) I asked to join a group and got back a reply asking for my last name and SKP number before we would be “approved.”  Double hummm.

The way I had these groups configured there was no approval process when joining; if you could somehow find the group then you could click “join” and you were in, just like that.  It turned out that if you went to our profile page all of the groups we belonged to were listed, including these supposedly “private” ones.  (They had to be listed somewhere or we would not be able to get to them ourselves.)  The person who managed to join without an invitation had stumbled upon this “back door.”  It was someone that I was trying to help join the group, so it was OK and I learned a lot about RVillage in the process.  Thanks Donn.

In the case of the group we were trying to join it was immediately obvious that:  a) there was some sort of “approval” mechanism available for RVillage groups, and; b) the owner/leader of this group was verifying membership in both the Escapees RV Club, and in the BOF which this RVillage group was set up to serve, before approving the request to join.  This was both easier and more secure than what I was doing, and was the mechanism I needed.  Today I finally made it a priority to change the configuration of the three groups.  It took a few tries to realize how two of the parameters were interacting, but I finally got it to work the way I wanted.  Now I had to let everyone know.

Late last month I wrote customized versions of an article for the GLCC and CCO newsletters on how to join RVillage and then join the corresponding group.  Those articles had not yet appeared in a newsletter, so I revised them to indicate the new procedure and sent them off to the editors.  I customized a version for the FTH group and sent it to our e-mail list.  Within the hour a member followed the directions and was able to join.  Success!  Thanks Steve.

I also sent the GLCC version of the article to the National Senior VP of FMCA, who happens to be a member of GLCC and has already joined RVillage and the GLCC group.  He called a short time later to ask if I would be willing to serve on a relatively new national Education Committee that was tasked, among other things, with pursuing the mutual benefit of FMCA’s involvement with RVillage.  So, as of that phone call I have been “appointed” to the committee and the committee chair is being notified.  I am reminded at this juncture of the expression “be careful what you wish for because you may get it.”

With all of the RVillage stuff handled for the moment I was able to turn my time and attention to finishing my WordPress post for yesterday and photo gallery posts for the last two days.  The photos are a lot of work, but I am getting faster with practice and, hopefully, better.  Photography has been important to me since I was 16, even to the point of having tried doing it professionally for a while.  But what it comes down to is that I enjoy nature and landscape photography from a fine art perspective and I like making images of things that interest me, such as converted buses, the people who build and use them, the places we go in ours, and the people we meet along the way.  So the work isn’t really work; it’s a hobby for which I have a long-standing passion.

The rain had stopped some time ago and the sun came finally came out.  I took that as an opportunity to disconnect and stow the fresh water hoses, water softener, and waste water hoses.  The sun dropped lower and cast a beautiful low angle, warm light on wet foliage set against distant gray skies and passing white clouds.  Landscape photographers live for such moments and hope they are in the right place when they occur.  It was the kind of light that photographers try to create in studios.  I waited for passing clouds to briefly reveal the light and clicked away until it faded again.

For dinner Linda made her whole wheat Angel hair pasta with mushrooms, onions, garlic, and sun-dried tomatoes sautéed in a small amount of olive oil.  A simple green salad, a couple small pieces of a multigrain baguette, and a glass of Franzia Sangria completed the meal.  The Publix in South Walton is the first store where we have seen this particular Franzia wine.  It was red, but it was fruity, and I liked it.  Linda, maybe not as much, at least not with the pasta.