OK, it wasn’t the Space Shuttle.

I wasn’t even close enough to hear it.

It was over much faster than expected.

And René had the camera while out weeding the fields so I have no nifty pictures of my own to show.

But it was exciting nonetheless.

Thanks to Florida Today’s Flame Trench Blog, it was almost like I was right at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station launch pad SLC-17.

Almost.

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The morning we left Jetty Park for Vero Beach after discovering the shuttle launch was not going to happen, we decided to pack up quick and beat the crowds to the dump station.

It was early but we still weren’t first in line. Everyone was heading out, except for those just waking to make breakfast.

As we dumped our tanks using our new clear hose adapter, René glanced at the nearby rigs, smelled the air and said, “Yum, Bacon and Turds!”

Why did we get one of those clear dump hose adapters, you ask?

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After 7 months of fulltiming, Jim and I have gotten into the groove of doing whatever we want, whenever we want. Sure, there are a few occasions when work-like commitments require us to stay inside and bang away on our keyboards for a few hours. But overall, our life is seriously lacking in any routines.

Sadly though, this trip isn’t about sitting on our butts indefinitely. Now that we have reached the midway point of our year-off, it’s time to test the waters in business choices that we’ve always been interested in, but never had the time to pursue. A “vocation vacation” if you will.

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Let’s get one thing straight; Jim and I are not Gamblers. The few times we’ve found ourselves in Vegas, I would stand there gawking at the Gambling species, dumbfounded as I watched them willingly toss money away.

But last week while waiting for the space shuttle to take off, our fun campground neighbors Carol and John invited us to join them on a “free” four-hour casino cruise. In Florida, where gambling is illegal, Sun Cruz Casinos will take passengers out to blow money at sea, three miles offshore in international waters. They had a free shuttle that would pick us up right at our campground. “You get all of the free food and booze you want!” my neighbor said excitedly.

Now that caught my attention. Whenever I hear “Free” and “Booze” in the same sentence, this cheapskate gets happy. All that, and we’d get a “free” cruise in Florida too. Ah, the things trip memories are made of! I grabbed Jim and said “let’s go!”

Later, neither one of us would realize that we were about to set foot on a third rate, smoky casino from hell, unable to escape!

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I just had to share this classic RVing video I found on YouTube. Ya gotta love the old school slide out (at 01:21) circa 1937! You can find this and other funny RV videos in our Road Trip Favorites video playlist.

How appropriate since it talks about RVers flocking to the “Land of the Palms” and we are currently sweltering in Florida. Note the date of this post!

Last Saturday while waiting for the Space Shuttle to take off, a friendly camper introduced herself to me. Her name was Kim Cunningham, and she is a fulltiming mother and wife with three children who are traveling across America right now, in search of their next endeavor.

Kim (41), her husband Regis (47), daughter Jessica (15), son Regis III (9), and Seb (6), sold their principal home in Cody, Wyoming last May. Regis is a real estate investor who for the last 25 years has taken marginal homes, fixed them up, and turned them into money making opportunities. Kim was a Creative Memories consultant for 13 years, while working together with Regis to manage their properties. This year, they had planned to leave Cody, buy another fixer-upper in Pennsylvania and settle down for a while, but when in Pennsylvania, circumstances didn’t turn out as they’d hoped, so they decided to stay on the road and keep looking.

How does a family with three kids, four dogs and one cat do it?

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Since June, we’ve been searching for the ideal place to live and start a business. We are talking to locals in towns across America, interviewing and taking notes, trying to get a feel for places that might come close to what we consider “perfect.”

But is all this work just a waste of energy? Are we searching for a utopia that doesn’t exist?

Tell us: What factors make up your ideal community?

As we tack on the miles, we keep seeking these answers.

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As we chase the sun from North to South, we are living out an eternal summer. It’s wonderful being in Floriduh, where we have all the farm fresh produce we want, and the sun shines all day while the rest of the country is freezing their butts off. But life in Margaritaville makes it a little hard for us to get into that ol’ Christmas spirit. It seems so ridiculous to hear a country version of White Christmas on the radio, when it’s eighty one freekin’ degrees outside, humid as all hell, and we’re sipping Mojitos.

But last Saturday morning, bright and early at 8 AM, Santa came to visit us at Jetty Park. He wanted to make sure us fulltimers knew what time of year it really is.

After Santa’s visit, I got a little sad that we won’t be seeing our families in California this Christmas. But still, we’re glad to be escaping the annual consumer shopping orgy, and not doing much of anything on the 25th. Now, our New Year’s Eve plans are another story . . .

This is Ken, my brother in law’s Father. Here he is recently in his front yard in Belgium, Wisconsin. Jim and I visited Ken and his wife Arleen, back in August.

We really loved that area of Wisconsin, and we want to go back to check it out as a possibility for permanent relocation, but definitely not anytime soon.

This is us, on the beach at Port Canaveral, Florida very early Sunday morning (K, not my best picture, but it was early!).

So, where would you rather be right now?

We’ve finally made it to White Rabbit Acres organic farm in Vero Beach for our extended workamping stay after spending too much time waiting for the space shuttle to lift off.

We did have fun – and lots of margaritas – with our new friends in Port Canaveral. But our longer than expected stay just proves that time flies like, well … it seems to fly better than the Space Shuttle Atlantis right now anyway.

We didn’t even have time to catch everyone up on our stay in St. Augustine. René wrote about our visit to the Fountain of Youth, but the oldest city in the U.S offers much more history than that small artesian well which now rests some twelve feet below a room of dioramas depicting Ponce de León with his newfound Seminole friends.

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I’m not just talking about the first Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum, nor the umpteenth Thomas Kinkade Gallery. For starters, the Castillo de San Marcos is much more prominent and majestic. Walking its grounds, I couldn’t help but think of all the bloody battles that took place on the same spot so long ago.

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