Found a new home and diving

July 14 Thursday. Time flies when you're having fun.
Having been turned on to the county park system I browsed through Broward County's site and found C.B. Smith Park. It has a rather large RV campground. We made the trip to there today and reserved the last handicap spot for the winter. It's a paved double wide site and the bathrooms are very nice.
Then we made the trek across town to Swap Shop. It is a flea market, farmer's market and 14 screen drive in theater.

 The real reason I wanted to bring the boys. Last time we visited this place in 2009, they had a Bugatti Veyron. No such luck today.

 The owner of the swap shop, Preston Henn used to race cars in the 24 Hours of Dayton. This is one he drove with Al Unser.

The boys fell in love with the world's fastest Ferrari. It's electric.

 The second story of the swap shop is dedicated to an arcade. The boys loaded two cards with ten dollars a piece and spent two hours playing games. Garrett tried to use all his card up as he knew he wasn't coming back and when we checked his card at the machine it still had ten dollars left on it.

On the way out we bought a fresh coconut to drink!

 With the money on Patrick's card and the ten bucks remaining on Garrett's the boys won Pokemon cards from a machine where they had to make a set of lights stop between two other lights. I told them it was rigged and it would never happen. Two spins later they won the game. Then we had to find someone to open the game to get the cards out because they didn't fall in the chute and come out.

 Becky likes to try exotic fruits and bought some rambutan on the way out. It wasn't too bad. Tasted like a grape with a giant seed in the middle.

 Then we went over to Aquatic Ventures and Rick and Kerry loaded up gear and we headed for Dania Beach where they do a lot of open water training dives with students. They drug me across the sand and flopped me in the water. I say it like that because they've done it before and have some good stories about flopping me in the water because I'm not that graceful getting out of the chair. I packed all my gear from Ohio except the tanks.

a baby guitar shark

After the dive which was about 76 minutes and 22 feet deep, we had dinner at the Dania Beach grill and headed for home. While we dove, Becky and the boys and Michelle swam. The water was 90 degrees.

Moving south, searching for a place to lay my head

July 10, 2016 Sunday
We were up moderately early for such a late night. The first stop was Cracker Barrel for some road fuel and to thank them for letting us stay.

The boys played a game while we waited.

 We tucked into good food.

After breakfast we got back on the road. We slabbed it all the way to our friend's home in Green Cove Springs, FL. We spent a week with them last year. This visit was just over night and it was great to see everyone again.

 Crossed a big river somewhere. Becky took some pictures.

 Naomi wanted to take some selfies with Becky and Andrea, the one in the back, jumped in on the action. The boys holed up in Willie's room to play video games and Abigail watched cartoons. The adults talked and told stories over bar-b-que.

 July 11, 2016 Monday. We rolled south again!

 After several hours pounding I-95. I needed a beach fix so we turned left at Ft. Pierce to A1A and found a public beach parking lot. Garrett got his first glimpse of the mighty Atlantic and he threw his hands in the air and screamed, "This is awesome!"

 We ended up at Paradise Island RV Resort. I randomly picked it out of the ones I wanted to look at. The bathrooms were not accessible or the showers. I couldn't get into either one of them. The doors were not wide enough. They did have a nice pool lift. Scratch one off the list.
The boys practiced their superman jumps!

July 12, 2016 Tuesday.
We packed up the trailer and made a tour of the different parks getting further and further away from my target area Ft. Lauderdale. We were going north and the final park on my list absolutely sucked. I won't tell you the name of it or the name of the owner who treated us very rudely and claimed that his establishment had passed an inspection that allowed him to say he was accessible. This was clearly a lie because there were no grab bars in the bathrooms or hallways remotely wide enough to get a chair or a walker through. But the guy did us a solid by letting us know right up front that he was a jerk and pointed us to John Prince Park. The park turned out to be city owned and was indeed accessible. We set up the trailer and called it good.
Becky and I went to the grocery store and the boys stayed at the trailer with the pets and played on their electronics. Garrett was all the time dragging Patrick out to walk the dog or ride bikes. It was good to have him along to entertain each other.

Some crazy red headed Muscovy ducks.

Iris allowed these birds to steal all of her food. 

July 13, Wednesday BEACH DAY! We drove about three miles to Lantana Beach. There were two lines of rocks easily accessible at low tide so Becky and the boys could snorkel and see lots of fish. Becky saw a baby octopus. There was a nice shelter that I could sit at because I wasn't able to get down to the water. There were two flights of steps from the board walk.

 That evening after showers for everyone, we drove down to Ft. Lauderdale to meet up with Rick and Michelle Thomas and Kerry McNeal. I've know these three characters for a lot of years and have done a lot of diving with them. Rick and Michelle now own Aquatic Ventures in Fort Lauderdale. Kerry also works there. They told me I was welcome to come work for them for free anytime.
Rick and Michelle were up from Florida last Christmas and bought me dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings and Rick said I owned him dinner next time I was in Florida.
We went out to Aruba Beach Cafe. Then walked on the pier and the board walk to look at knick knacks. We bought some t-shirts too.

The bald guys is Rick, Patrick photobombing, me, Becky, Kerry and Michelle

 Rick bought some oysters on the half shell and Garrett tried one. We didn't know if he was going to keep it down. He said it was good but didn't want another one.

 As we were walking out on the pier some guys who were fishing had caught a baby nurse shark. I wasn't fast enough to get a photo. They threw him back in.

Road Trip to Florida

July 9, 2016
We left from Ohio headed to Florida for a quick trip to find a place to winter over. As you know I need some special accommodations with the bathrooms and showers. I looked at a lot of places on Google Maps (Satellite View) and many park web pages but you can't really tell what they are like until you lay eyes on them. I didn't want to be stuck someplace that wasn't accessible.
Along for the trip was my 11 year old nephew Garrett. He was a great joy to have on the trip and he was dying to go along with us for an adventure. When I told him he was welcome to come with us to Florida, the first thing he asked was,  "can I go swimming in the ocean?"  Uhmm...YES!
I opted to take Route 23 south from Columbus all the way to Asheville, NC because I didn't want to drive on the interstate. It added time to the route but it was better than staring at the super slab all day.

 The boys spent a lot of time on their hand held electronics.

 For me there is always something special about leaving Ohio and crossing the river. A feeling of shaking free, being back on the road again. No matter what, it takes us three hours to get out of Ohio unless you go west to Indiana and then it takes like two. It's always nice to leave.

 If we had gone straight through town and not on the truck route we would have crossed this neat bridge.

 Becky tried to take pictures of all the state signs for Garrett but not all of them came out well.

We stopped for the night in Orangeburg, SC. Originally we were going to stay at a Pilot but it was hot and about a thousand diesels were idling in the parking lot. So we tried a Camping World only to find it's gates locked. Then we went to a Cracker Barrel. There was no one else in the lot so we got to sleep about 2:30. I hate these long days on the road but I wanted to get to Florida quickly to maximize our time there.

Update

We have spent the last few weeks traveling. I've been lazy and not uploaded anything. We drove down to Ft. Lauderdale and secured a place for the winter at CB Smith Park beginning in November. We will be there with friends who own a dive shop, Aquatic Ventures. I plan to dive a lot. When we get back to Ohio, (which will be tomorrow) I will do a proper upload and bring you all up to speed on the latest journey. We brought my nephew Garrett with us. So from his first time at the beach to our trip to see the Ark.