Back as Owners at TGO

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After spending 6 weeks in the Bushnell area, we are heading back to Titusville to park in our own lot that we closed on about 3 weeks ago. We had learned our lesson driving Route 50 across and going through Orlando. We opted to take the Florida turnpike. It’s about the same distance (about 100 miles) but much faster. We figure it is well worth the $14 it will cost to go that way. It was a miserable day weather wise with temps in the 50’s and very rainy. We safely made it to The Great Outdoors (TGO) but when we arrived, I noticed we had a check engine light on. The rig had been running fine without any noticeable issues. After we got parked, I was able to read out the error code but there wasn’t much information regarding the specifics. It was an “unknown component” with a low reading.

It didn’t help that we were coming in on a Saturday afternoon, but we called around to several of the Freightliner service centers in the general area. Many of the ones we have used across the country for either our annual service or breakdowns on the road, do not take reservations for any appointment. You simply show up and you are put in the queue with all the truckers needing service. The ones in this area actually require appointments for RVs but they were booked out for over 6 weeks! That wasn’t going to work for us since we were planning on staying here for 2 weeks and the heading to Vero Beach for a Habitat for Humanity build. We found there were a couple of Cummins service centers in the Orlando area but by then they were closed for the weekend.

We settled into our lot but we waited for the rain to pass before hooking up all the utilities. Here are some pictures of our lot taken after our purchase offer was accepted back around Christmas. The driveway is about 70 feet deep and over 13 feet wide. This is plenty big enough for our 38 foot motorhome with 4 slides. In one back corner of the driveway, the pad extends out and there is a 10 foot by 12 foot shed as well a plenty of room for a patio table and chairs. The lawn is maintained as part of our home owners association fees, but there are a couple of planting areas with various trees, shrubs and other plants that we will be responsible for. The concrete driveway is in very good condition and the shed seems to be well built. The only thing we will eventually need to deal with is the rear stoop of the shed is starting to rot.

Our Lot at TGO

Planter on the West

Side of Shed

Planter on East

Shed Interior

By the time Monday rolled around, we had spoken with several of the neighbors at TGO about our check engine light and they had suggested we talk with the RV repair shop that is within the park. I knew the facility was there but I figured they would only deal with issues with the “house” side of the motorhome - slide outs, air conditioners, appliances and the like. But it turns out they actually handle chassis and engine issues too. In fact one of the neighbors we know, from a podcast they create that we have listened to for over a decade, has their annual service done by the team at Eagles Pride here at TGO. We stop by Monday morning and explain our situation. They say they can send a technician down on Thursday to read the error codes and formulate a plan. This was music to our ears.

We had lots of errands to run around town to handle some paperwork with the county and also to get the equipment from Spectrum which provides the cable and internet service at TGO. We spend a few hours getting all the equipment setup and everything seems to work fine. There was one surprising thing about how the cable channels are supplied to our televisions. Instead of some sort of cable box that hooks up to the coax cable from Spectrum and the TV via HDMI, our cable channels are all done with streaming boxes that connect wirelessly with our cable router/modem. It will be a different scenario for us but since we are used to only having over the air TV channels - and sometimes very few if any of them - we will have way more viewing options than we will know what to do with.

Of course, now that we own real estate again, there are chores to take care of around the site. Chris spent a great deal of time weeding the several garden areas and becoming familiar with the types of plants here in Florida. The shed itself is in good shape but it did need new blinds for the windows, door locks and hardware to keep the door from blowing around in the wind when it is open. Several of the palm trees needed some near dead fronds trimmed. There wasn’t too much do and to some degree I think we missed having a place to putz around. Our old place in western New York was nearly 50 acres and had a several thousand square foot house. The lot here is about a tenth of an acre with a 120 square foot shed, so it is dramatically smaller and more manageable.

We Are On Our Site

Thursday morning rolled around and the service guy from Eagles Pride came down to our site to read our motorhome’s error codes. They called back just before lunch and asked if we could bring the rig down. They wanted to perform a regen of the exhaust system which basically consists of running the engine at a high throttle for an hour or so while the exhaust system heats up to well over 1000 degrees to burn off all the soot. Once this was complete, all the parameters for the exhaust system were well within tolerance and the error message was taken care of. It wasn’t perfectly clear what might have caused the error message in the first place, but now we can feel confident that the rig is good again.

With our chores more or less complete, we have time to explore the area a bit more. Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge is just across the Indian River from Titusville so it’s only a 15 mile drive to the visitor center. We stop to pick up some information for the refuge and ask for suggestions of things to do. The ranger and volunteers were very helpful once we told them we now live in the area rather than “we have a few hours to see something” like most visitors coming in might say. They offer all sorts of suggestions for hiking and biking that should come in handy during this visit and during future stops at TGO.

For this visit, we head back west a little bit to the start of Black Point Wildlife Drive. This is a 7 mile one way gravel road that loops thru a portion of the refuge. Several people at TGO had suggested this drive as being a really good one for spotting wildlife especially birds. The road itself was in great shape and we didn’t need to go far to start to see a wide variety of birds.

Nice Wide Road

Glossy Ibis

Tri-color Heron

~100 Coots

Just under 2 miles along the drive is the Wild Bird Trail. We stop to do the quarter mile walk out to two different bird blinds along the way. From these we happened upon even more birds.

Boardwalk to Bird Blind

Heron Flies By

Snowy Egret Takes Off

When we have infrequently seen roseate spoonbills in the past, it is usually a singular bird but near the second bird blind and boardwalk, there were about 10 of them in a small pond area. Most were taking a nap while standing on one leg although a few were moving about looking for something to eat. With all the action going on in this location, we ended up spending a quite a long time along this trail.

Group of Spoonbills

Vibrant Plumage

Spoonbills Chase Heron

Side View of Bird Blind

Tri-color Heron

Winds Blows Feathers

As we continued the drive around, there is another side parking area after 1.5 miles that is the starting point for the Cruickshank Trail. This is a 5 mile loop that sounds like a nice walk but we weren’t planning on doing that much of a hike. However there is an observation tower less than a quarter mile down the trail that we felt was worth checking out. We will save the hike for a different visit.

View from Tower

Pied-billed Grebe

A half mile or so before the end of the drive, we came upon a large group of cars pulled over to the side of the road. At first I noticed another group of spoonbills and figured that what was causing the traffic jam. But when I got out of the car to check them out, I noticed there was a group of 8 wild pigs foraging in the brush a couple hundred feet away. They mainly walked around with their heads down but did occasionally look up. This turned out to be a nice drive and spent about 2.5 hours taking in the sights along the way.

This Little Piggy...

About 6 miles north of the exit for Black Point is the Manatee Observation Deck. It sounded like a place to go but it turned out that today was too cold to expect to see any manatees.

No Manatees Today

View of Haulover Canal and Lift Bridge

A couple days later we wanted to head southwest of Titusville to get a geocache in Osceola county Florida. We weren’t seeing any parks or hiking trails there that would make for a good reason to drive the 25 miles required but we did see the Burton Smith Park that was on the way. It has several geocaches as well as a disc golf course. We planned to get in a hike there then drive a few miles across the county line to find a cache. We were surprised by how many people were actually out playing disc golf. We wandered around the course and found some of the caches. A good portion of this park has trails that were flooded out so we had to skip a fair number of them. There were nicely carved totem poles around the grounds near each golf tee.

View at Burton Smith Park

Comical Totem

Having missed out on manatees the other day, we saw that Blue Spring State Park about 50 miles to the northwest of TGO was rated as a good place to see manatees. We head up there one morning with the plan of making a day of it.

Manatee Count: 202

We had read that this park tends to fill up early in the day and they stop permitting visitors from coming in, so we arrived before 9 AM. Parking was fine but when we left after lunch, the line coming in was very long and the parking lots looked to be near capacity. There is a boardwalk that runs parallel to the springs for about a quarter mile. The manatee count for today was just over 200. This wasn’t quite as good as the 300 plus at the Three Sisters Spring in Crystal River a couple years ago but it seems like a decent number. At this time of year, kayaks are not permitted in the spring area so we didn’t have people in the water to contend with but there were many people gathered at each of the viewing stations along the boardwalk.

Beautiful Morning at Blue Spring SP

Boaters Not Permitted Close to the Springs

There was a team from a manatee rescue group present and they were just stating to board their boat. It wasn’t clear what there mission was today but we never saw them up along the spring. The manatee viewing wasn’t all that impressive. I’m not sure if the water clarity was a factor or simply the spring area is rather large so the manatee density wasn’t very high.

Manatee Rescue Group

Fish Enjoying the Warm Spring Water

Manatee Approaching

Several Manatees

As we continued up the boardwalk to the head spring, we notice these large floats in the water that kind of looked like big bobbers. We discovered that certain of the manatees have a rope with a bobber attached to make their movement easier to see. It wasn’t exactly clear why these were singled out but it didn’t seem to impact their ability to swim around. There were a fair number of manatees back at the main spring but that also meant they were even more people. We actually needed to wait our turn at one overlook in order to get a good look ourselves.

Bobber on the Move

Colorful Reflections

Head Spring

The old Thursby House sits on the grounds of the state park and is now a museum. The rooms are furnished and there are many interpretive signs describing the history of the area around what is now Blue Springs SP.

Mosaic Tile Manatee

Thursby House

Kitchen

Since the walk along the boardwalk wasn’t all that strenuous, we decided to to go for a bit of a hike on some of the trails in other parts of the park grounds. The Pine Island Trail is listed as a 4.9 mile out and back hike. The first portion of the hike was nice in the shade of the pine forest, but most of the trail was along a sandy service road with full sun so it wasn’t the most enjoyable hike we’ve done. We cut the hike short and kept it to 3.6 miles.

Pine Island Trail

Scrub Jay

Since we were close to Sanford Florida, we decided to to head there. We had heard it was an interesting little town on Lake Monroe - plus there is an Adventure Lab there to give us a tour of the downtown area.

Along the Waterfront

Monument

Much of our walk stared out along the waterfront and marina area. The 105 foot long Barbara Lee is an old sternwheeler river boat that still offers cruises on the lake and the adjoining St Johns River.

Sanford Marina

Old Sternwheeler

Osprey Dives for Fish

Part of our tour took us thru the quaint old town area with lots of small shops and restaurants. We didn’t take advantage of the Sanford Museum but was impressed with the arts and crafts style of columns at the front door. We spent an hour or so wandering around before heading back home.

Sanford Museum

Ornate Column

Abstract Art

A few days later, a geocaching friend of ours from western NY contacted us and asked if we wanted to join him for a nearby geocaching event. Jon was down in Florida visiting a friend and was planning on heading to a spot not too far from TGO. The event was at a shelter in the Little Big Econ State Forest. We met up with him there and then went out to hike a short section of the Florida Trail near Lake Mills. We enjoyed the time we got to spend with our friend and to hear about things going on back in Wester NY.

Jon needed to get back to his friends so we headed over to Econlockhatchee Sandhills Conservation Area. We ate our lunch in the parking lot and then headed out for a nice 3.6 mile hike on some of the trails there and found 7 caches along the way.

That Name is a Mouthful

Nice Hiking Trail

Unusual "Multi" Cache

We were heading out on Sunday to go to Vero Beach but TGO was holding its annual garage sale the day before we leave. We didn’t have a long list of things we wanted but now that we own a shed, we can actually buy something if it can stay here when we are gone for the warmer months. We figured we could find a few hand tools to work in the yard and garden beds plus we would really like to find a patio table and chair set so we can sit outside in comfort.

The sale started early in the morning and we wanted to get to all the sites that had things for sale. We hopped on our bikes and started our journey around TGO stopping at pretty much every place that had things sitting out in their yard, driveway or garage. I’ll guess that roughly 10 to 20 percent of the places had things out for sale. I found lots of stuff that I would have liked if we still owned a home but nothing I needed for our current lifestyle. We went up and down every single road in TGO. A couple hours into our travels we found what looked like a perfect table and chair set for us. We came up with a price and told the woman we would be back later in the day with the car to pick the furniture up.

By the time we made it back to our lot, we had racked up just over 16 miles of biking! We were skeptical that there were that many roads in TGO but after looking at it in Google Earth, I confirmed that 16 miles is required to travel all the roads within the resort. We head back over with the Jeep and found it took us three trips to get the 4 chairs and table with glass top back home. As we were cleaning up the furniture, we discovered they had a tag attached telling us the manufacturer. We had never heard of Woodard patio furniture, but they seem to have pretty high end furniture and although I couldn’t find our exact style on their website, it was clear we had gotten a great deal on this set.

Jack and Chris Relax in Our New Chairs

Hawk Perched Nearby