It has been quite a while since my last entry but not because there was nothing to write. There has been lots of happenings with Tom and me. After the May outing with the Traveling Americans we received an offer to buy our house in Taneytown. That proved to be a very trying time for us. We believed everything was in order to finalize the sale when the bottom fell out. We had emptied out our house and had our belongings placed in storage and then learned the sale was off. We had no other choice but to continue on with our plans to go to The Villages in Florida to find a home and live in the motorhome during this time. We actually found a home to our liking before leaving Maryland and placed an offer contingent on our having visual inspection within 5 days. We had asked friends to check out the house for us and then we arrived and gave the final thumbs up for purchasing the house. We settled on the Florida home on July 29th and spent our first night in the house on the 30th. We had purchased some new furnishings and brought some items out of the motorhome to make the house liveable until our stored belongings arrived about the 18th of August. Gastley's Moving Company handled moving our items and we were very pleased with the service. Our Maryland house was finally settled on October 26th, four months after the original date.
We settled into the life in The Villages. Tom has been playing golf on Tuesday mornings. We have joined a Segway Club that has monthly Segway rides at various locations. We belong to a club for former residents in the Mid-Atlantic region of the country. The village we live in is St. Charles which has a social club that we have joined. We occasionally go to a town square in the evenings for the entertainment. And we enjoy eating out at the many restaurants in this area.
But we also soon realized that we needed to get away for a bit in the motorhome. We loaded up last Tuesday, November 24th, and drove to Palm Harbor to BayAire Campground to spend 5 days over Thanksgiving. Palm Harbor is on the Gulf coast of Florida. Tuesday (24th) we had a late lunch at Ozona Blue restaurant which served a wonderful seafood pasta dish that was loaded with shrimp, scallops, mussels, clams and grouper. Wednesday we went to Tarpon Springs and walked through many of the shops in the area of the Sponge boats. We had another good meal at Mama's restaurant of grouper prepared in a Greek style. Thursday, Thanksgiving, we drove to Clearwater and stopped at beaches along the way. Our Thanksgiving meal was at Crabby Bill's, another seafood meal. Friday we went to a park between Palm Harbor and Tarpon Springs called Sunset Point which had a nice beach that we walked along and then we had a picnic lunch with sandwiches from Subway. On Saturday we again went to Tarpon Springs for an Arts and Craft show and then to the Sponge piers. We took a 2 hour dolphin boat tour that went to Anchor Island, a state park island. We did see a couple dolphins as well as birds- ospreys, bald eagles and others. We went with a Mexican lunch on this day. Sunday we left Palm Harbor driving the motorhome to Wildwood to spend the night since the storage lot that the motorhome is stored is not accessible on weekends. Monday we drove to the storage lot to park the motorhome and then returned to home.
Cape Cod Canal
4 hours ago
