Every time we travel in the van we say that we are not going to hop around from town to town…we are going to take our time and settle down. Maybe we say this because we don’t like packing & unpacking. Even though we are totally self-contained in our campervan, there are still hook-ups that need to happen, stuff to be drained, bikes to rack, captain seats swiveled, and coffee-maker & appliances to be put in place or stored away. Oh, and a bunch of pillows need to be moved around. (Douglas loves this part. NOT!)
After the Walmart boondocking, we found 1 night available at a county campsite near Melbourne Beach. Long Point campground is a short drive to the beach but located on the Indian River. The cool thing about our site was that you could launch a canoe or kayak directly from the campsite! 90% of the sites are on the Indian River. Now we just need to buy some blow-up kayaks.
Douglas met our camping neighbors by offering to help them set up a 5 min. ‘Clam’ shade structure and found out they were staying at Long Point for 3 months with a bunch of other friends when their Long Pine Key reservations were cancelled due to hurricane damage. Amazon shipped their new Clam structure direct to the campsite. They tried to teach us a little bit about the ins-&-outs of booking campsites and piecemeal a bunch of short stays at one campsite, but in different sites, into a single long stay at one site. It sure seemed like a lot of work that has to be done day after day checking with booking/reservations. Most assuredly too much work for us these days.
There is a nice short walk from the campsite across the river to an island where we did some hunting and gathering of firewood. We found some old picnic areas that had been damaged by storms and it gave the island an eerie feel at times.
Pic of our favorite campervan at this site:
The weather was cold and windy- not ideal for extended beach time but we still enjoyed our walks on the beach.
[EDs: Eventually many beach shots start to look the same and when you hit several beaches in one day, even the metadata from your digital camera all starts looking the same, So maybe these beach photos are of this beach or maybe not.]
On our way north on the coast, we picked up breakfast and ate on Juniper Beach, then leisurely drove thru Juniper Island which is part of St. Lucia, googling at all of the mansions and meticulously landscaped yards. This is the most affluent community in the US with around 817 residents like Tiger Woods https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-kVPyuJl24 and Celine Dion.
Consulting our Road Food book, we decided to stop at JB’s Fish Camp: http://jbsfishcamp.com/
They had what Douglas calls the best Hush Puppies of the trip since the kitchen adds a little red and green pepper to the mix to spice them up. This was also the location of the lightest, fluffiest, best tasting Key Lime pie that we had on our trip (NOTE: it is not green. no food coloring added – yeah)! SORRY, but no photo of the pie. We usually order our lunches, eat about half of it, box the rest and then order the pie slice ‘for-takeaway’. So it was consumed later that night. Below is a snap of Lisa’s shrimp and my flounder. And now we are off to explore another beach!
