Elephant for dinner

For Christmas, I bought a reclining folding camping chair for Consuelo. She's wanted one for a long time, and this looked like the right time. We had to remove two regular folding chairs to make space for it, so we can only accept one visitor at a time unless they bring their own chair, or stand up.


This is Aunt Flo, taken at Pier 41 in Naples on New Year's eve. Aunt Flo is famous for pies, among other things, back in Massachusetts. She won the Crisco bake-off one year, and I use her recipe when I bake pies.

Flo is 89 this year, and has a double-wide mobile home here in Naples. She's here from November until May. Our travels are such that we saw her in Massachusetts, then parked in here driveway down here for a week.

This is Deedee Keyes. Deedee and Flo are friends from way back in the last century, back in Wilbraham, MA, where I grew up. Deedee inspired Flo to buy her place here, since Deedee had one before Flo did. Deedee is a lot younger, only 85. Consuelo and I have trouble keeping up with them when we visit. Their schedule is packed... Thursday nights at Pippins, Saturday breakfasts, bingo on Tuesday. In between they play cards, a game called Aggravation, and we play it with them when we're around.

That's me on New Year's eve. We went to dinner with Flo, Deedee, and Ron and Carol Hable, friends of theirs from Wilbraham, also owning a double wide in the same park as Flo and Deedee.

Pier 41 is a nice restaurant in a great spot on the waterfront in Naples, in an enclave called "Tin City". The food was excellent. I had yellow fin, but Flo, with her twin hearing aids, thought I said elephant.

On January 1st, we moved to Collier -Seminole State Park, about 15 miles southeast of Naples. We re-discovered on our arrival that I had miscalculated the reservation for this park. Since I couldn't reserve 2 solid weeks, I had reserved 2 segments, one for the 1st to the 5th, and on for the 6th to the 14th. That meant I had no reservation for the 5th. With much ado, I managed to book a site over the phone (they don't do reservations within the park) for the 5th. Unfortunately the 3 reservations were in 3 different sites, so we moved on Friday and Saturday.

The Flood

Just to make things interesting, when I dumped our tanks on Friday, I spilled a few gallons of very dirty water into one of our bays down below. This occurred because I had failed to reconnect the outlet hose after I took apart 1/2 of the dump piping to remove a clog a couple days before. I quicjly closed the valve, and flushed the bay to get out all the dirty water. But in flushing, some of the clear water rolled into 4 of the other bays, thoroughly wetting the carpet. So after I connected the hose and dumped and moved to our site, I took everything out of storage and let it dry. Of course, this was on Friday, so on Saturday I packed everything back in, moved to our new site, and took it all out gain so the carpet could finish drying. Most fortunately, some folks we met here had a couple of fans designed for drying caroetm and were kind enough to loan them to us. After 3 days, it was dry and I reloaded.

We'll be here until January 14th, then move up toward Tampa.