Tampa Bound

We woke up on Monday to an overcast day, but no rain so we left around 9 AM and headed for Mobile, AL and Florida.   Did not realize it, but the University of Southern Mississippi is located here in Hattiesburg.  We got a partial picture of their football stadium.

The next two pictures are of us approaching downtown Mobile.

The battleship 'Alabama' is here.

And a couple pics of the bay.

No ships were in port in Pensacola that we could see (not even any sister-ships, Vince!!).  

Saw this limo along the way – NICE, huh?

We found Destin and then our CG which was actually in Marimar Beach.  Very nice small CG.  

After getting settled in, we walked about 6 blocks to the beach.  Unfortunately, it was a private beach and we couldn’t get down to it.  The stairway leading to the beach had a small bar about half way down.  We asked if there was some way to get on the beach – Yes, we just needed to buy a drink!  So we had a pina colada and they opened the gate for us!!

Beautiful sand beach as you can see.  

Someone had made some dolphins out of the sand:

And Grandma did some handwriting in the sand.

We took off our shoes and waded in – as you might be able to see, the waves were real nice.  Someone was nice enough to take our picture.

We spent about and hour and then walked back to the CG for the evening.

This morning we got up early again and left about 8:45 AM.  We decided that we wanted to get to Ocala today (340 miles) rather than spend another day on the road.  Not sure if we mentioned it before, but our handle to open our galley tank to drain came off the first day.  So we have an appointment on Thursday at a RV dealer here in Ocala to get it fixed.  It needs to be screwed back on but the underbelly has to be lowered to get at the drain.  The dealer was busy but said they would fit us in, so we have no idea how long it will take.  Hope to be done in time to drive to Largo (about 80 miles) to the CG where we will store our RV while we are at the timeshare.  So we shall see.

This was the scenery for most of the way on I-10 across the FL panhandle.

About an hour East of Tallahassee, we ran into rain – actually a serious downpour!  We made it to the the I-75 interchange to head south toward Tampa with it still raining hard.  At one point I think we were down to 40 MPH and most everyone had their flashers on.  But then it cleared up and was sunny the last hour or so.

We are now at our CG here in Ocala and will stay here until Thursday morning when we go over to the RV dealer.  Will fill you in again later in the week...