I forgot to mention that yesterday we went food shopping for the first time since the beginning of this trip and went for an oil change. All together we will have driven almost 4000 miles by the end of this trip.
In the morning we went to Pine Island beach. It was a nice small beach with a playground, cafe, and knee deep calm waters. All the ingredients for the happiness of 3 and 4 year old boys. Also there were horse shoe crabs, regular crabs that buried themselves in the sand. Also we were at some point in the middle of a swarm of black flies. All of a sudden we were covered in them and the next minute they were gone. Then everyone’s cellphone got an Amber alert. That was puzzling but thank God for Google – we found out that the Amber alert means that a child was abducted in Tampa. Apparently they let everyone in the state know.
Our kids had a blast at the beach and we stayed there as long as the weather permitted. We had already prepared for the evening rain in the morning.
Since the beginning of this trip we were carrying three pieces of tarp with us – only now we got to use it. When I had bought the tarp and opened it up in my apartment I was thinking this is huge! Now that we opened it on the campground to hang it over the table it looked impossibly small! So we managed to hang two of them over the picnic table and to cover two beach chairs. It only took us two hours. Our neighbor on the other hand had a perfect set up with expandable poles that originally served as gold ball retrievers which he now used as the center dome for his tarp. A real engineer at work.
But our construction held up well. It was raining pretty heavily in the late evening and most of the night but our table and chairs kept dry. Our tent once again proved its worth as well – no water inside at all!
The next morning we made our last campfire, slowly packed up and prepared for the long trip home, with only one extended stop, in Richmond, Virginia. No more camping – it’s cold and wet north of here, so we’ll drive right through.
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