Bridges to cross

Saturday, February 18, 2012 FORT MYERS, FL – “Do not feed the alligators” says the sign a couple of streets over from our site, here at the Woodsmoke RV Park just south of Fort Myers. It’s planted next to a pond that could actually be home to an alligator, although, as I said to Val, I’ll believe it when I see it. After a whole month at Dunedin RV Park, we finally pulled up stakes and got back on the road. It was hard to say goodbye to John and Fawn (and Algarve the dog), as well as to some of the other terrific residents we’d gotten to know during our stay. Our time at Dunedin gave us time to explore, time to relax, time to fine tune our comforts in the new RV, and time to appreciate the snowbird lifestyle. But at this point, we are still vagabonds, seduced by the turn in the road and the curiosity to see what’s around the next corner. We know we will have to come back to Florida, because we could never see all its sights in one short trip. Still, we are looking forward to the next leg of the journey, which today has taken us further south along the state’s east coast. After driving through Clearwater and St. Petersburg, we crossed the mouth of Tampa Bay over the Sunshine Skyway. It’s a long, tall bridge with two sets of yellow suspension cables that rise over the water like a pair of giant triangles. In today’s humidity, the bridge, from a distance, seemed almost to float on air, with the shimmering water underneath melting into the sky overhead. We stopped at a rest stop just north of the bridge to have our lunch. The rest area also had a road leading to a fishing pier, and as we left to continue the journey, we could see lots of people had parked there to try their luck in the bay waters. Sea birds had the same objective (with their livelihood at stake rather than just their luck). We caught sight of one bird of prey a little further along, flying over the roadway with a hefty-looking fish dangling from its talons. Our new campground is larger than the one we left, and more tightly packed. More than half the sites are permanent, with double-wide park model trailers surrounded by potted plants, gnomes, flags and little signs with the residents’ names and home towns on display. There are lots of tall pine trees to provide shade, and somewhere up there is a wonderful songbird with the most amazing repertoire, that sang to us all evening. When we pulled in to our site, Val had positioned the RV perfectly on the concrete pad when a couple of staff members pulled up in a golf cart. The concrete pad, they explained, was our patio. We were supposed to be on the grass! Oops. Guess the neighbours got a bit of a chuckle out of that one. In no time we were all set up again, reveling in the simplicity of motorhome camping as compared to the fifth wheel camping we’ve been doing for the past ten years. We’ll be here for a bit more than a week. From the look of all the tourist brochures we picked up at the office, we are going to have plenty of choices of things to do. It’s great to be on the road again.