Midway!

We are spending the night at Midway Campground. Surprise, surprise, it's about midway across the Everglades on rt. 41.

My lovely wife and I decided to check it out. So what does this campground have to offer? It's a pretty good place if you have a big RV with significant power needs, like air conditioning. Power is offered in 12, 30 and 50 amps. Our power draw is pretty humble. We have a small fan instead of AC.

The campground is clean and well maintained. Sites ring a small gator pond. There's a single bathhouse, and it lacks showers. There is a pump out and one source of potable water. While most of the campground is geared to bigger units, there are some tent sites.

So far the people here are pretty friendly. Mostly it's northern folks avoiding cold winters. However, I had a nice talk with a Georgia man who was also escaping the cold.

It's funny. Everywhere we go, people feel pretty lucky to find a place to camp. Most of them lined their camping sites months in advance. They are all surprised to find out we've been getting making our reservations just days before. When people make reservations so far in advance there are last minute cancellations. We keep scouring the camping sites on the Internet, like Reserve America and the various government sites. As soon as spots open up, we lock them in.

The van is pretty handy as we can fit into a wide variety of sites. We just spent a week in Key Largo in what is officially called a tent site. They let us in because our van fits and we don't have AC drawing a lot of power. However, if a regular RV site opens up, we can use those too. Due to our solar electric system, staying on more primitive off-grid sites works. Worse come to worse we can stay at truck stops and Walmarts.

On our way out out of the Keys we stopped at a West Marine. Those are dangerous as they have lots of nifty marine things but at high prices. Sometimes they are the only place that carries what you need, so what can you do? We stopped in because we needed 5 feet of bungee cord. Before we got out, we had a new cooler bag, boat parts, new mask and snorkel for my lovely wife, and assorted odd and ends. A lot of stuff was marked down 75%, plus we had a couple of gift cards. Final damage was thirteen dollars, which wasn't too bad at all. We even got the bungee cord.

Internet by way of my Straight Talk hotspot is marginal. I wandered around with the unit, looking for a strong enough signal to get this blog out.

-Sixbears