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Eagle’s Landing RV Park, Holt Florida

Posted on by Katya Posted in RV Parks | Leave a comment

After leaving the Everglades, Miami and the Keys behind, we came to north Florida to take care of some of our legal/tax stuff in our resident county, on the way stopping at St George Island State Park for a week.
St George was awesome but for another blog.

We arrived in Crestview, more specifically, Holt, 10 miles west, to stay at Eagle’s Landing RV Park. For the first night we actually stayed at River’s Edge RV Park, a huge tree filled fisherman’s paradise park at the bottom of “the biggest hill in Florida” as one man called it, but we had almost no cell phone or mifi (our own wireless) signal and the campground wireless was limited to about 2 hours a day per person. Originally we had asked for a week but needed to go get cash. On the way to an ATM in Holt, we saw Eagle’s landing just past the freeway and pulled in to ask some questions. It was a much better spot for signals and they had Tengo internet, a bandwidth limited but not time limited, internet (2gb every 48hrs). We felt bad but told River’s Edge that we changed our minds and decided to only stay a night. The woman was a bit grumpy but what could she do, or why would she really care. They seemed to have plenty of people there. We stayed the night and moved to Eagle’s Landing the next morning.
The people at Eagle’s Landing were really nice. The couple at the office said they co-own the property with their aunt and uncle who were also camp hosts, while they lived in a double wide at the front of the property (with about 10 kids from what I can tell, maybe foster kids? maybe ever kid in Holt? – a town of population 500 or so).
Eagles Landing RV Park, Holt Florida

The park has just over 100 spots with plenty of space our your front door and to the front and back, assuming your trailer or bus isn’t 50 feet long by itself. The north side of the park has a huge long strip of open land specifically for dogs. Dogs have to stay leashed but that’s why they invented extending leashes I guess. They also don’t discriminate against breeds of dogs, openly at least. The ground seems pretty well free of poo, one owner stating that there are over 100 dogs in the park but you’d never know because everyone is so good about picking up after them. I think you’d also never know because most of the dogs are little indoor lap dogs who rarely go outside. I’ve seen about 5 dogs so far. There is no cable but, that is completely normal in state parks of course so it wasn’t disappointing to us. With antennae you get about 40 channels, 15 watchable ones, and that’s still more than we usually get. The park also has public restrooms and showers, pretty normal, except that Eagle’s landing only has one toilet shower combo room per gender, (Most people are using their own showers and toilets though so don’t think you wont get a chance at it), and they have a laundry room with 3 washers and 3 dryers for only $1 each! Before we were even setup I was walking to the laundry to take advantage, and a nice old lady even folded my clothes while we were out (I’d only told her she could move them if I wasn’t back and she wanted the dryer, nice!).

We spent Christmas and New Years here and have now returned after 2 weeks in Pensacola to take care of some unfinished business with the DMV and tax office in Crestview. Because the park is basically a big field (not my favorite park design but everything is spacious and nice so we didn’t mind), we weren’t able to keep our awning out because of the wind but it was much to cold out to be outside anyway. The weather got down to 18 degrees around Christmas so we prepared our hoses and pipes as best we could (also another blog) and kept the place warm with out new space heater.

Eagle’s Landing RV Park is probably the best RV park between Tallahassee and Pensacola (inland), depending on what you want. If you want to “camp”, try out River’s Edge RV Park at the bottom of the hill, If you are traveling full time or want a break from “camping” (we stay in camping places most the time), it’s a nice and super affordable dip back into civilization.

Eagles Landing RV Park, Holt Florida

New Years in San Antonio, TX

Posted on by Katya Posted in out and about | 2 Comments

So when nothing really happens, I dont blog. I suppose I can and should find things to blog about – even though they wont be that interesting to many of you, it will keep me blogging.

The last 2 weeks we’ve been at Travel World RV Park in San Antonio. It’s a pretty regular RV park with some fairly nice to fairly rude little old ladies working the counter. They have a little overpriced store in the office and spots run average $228 a week. They didn’t ask us, so I had to mention – that I read about the economy spots on their website – $150 a week. The lady looked rather annoyed and I asked what the difference was. “Cable” she said, “the economy spots don’t have cable”. I liked having cable at the last place. Having a TV to watch forced me to get away from the computer for 30 mins to watch some cartoons or news but charging nearly $80 a week for cable TV, digital or not = horrible. She failed to mention though that the economy spots also only have 30amp plugs as opposed to the usual 30 and 50 which allows us to (more conveniently) charge our batteries that all the 12 volt lights and car stereo (w/speakers, our house stereo too) use. We also had to buy a new drain hose because there was no way to park close enough to the drain in the ground. This however did not help us much – we bought the 10foot hose for $12 because, although we needed a longer one, the 20foot foot hose was $44 for some reason in their pricey little shop. Neither came with attachments so we also had to buy one of those – and after 2 weeks of stretching the hose as tight as we could, the attachment to the RV broke. It’s now held on with duct tape – they’re easy enough to get and cheaper than a new hose but.. well they’re about 60 feet away and that’s just too far in this cold.

Yeah.. cold. I always thought the south was warmer in the winter, and I guess sometimes it is – of course in the desert during the day, but it has been colder lately than Portland and even the mountain range my mom lives in in New Mexico. Tap is running and going to the bathrooms is a constant battle. We just happen to be parked about as far as possible from the bathrooms, another perk of the economy spot, and the other night when it was about 20 degrees, the locks to the bathrooms – some sort of metal key pad – were frozen and I couldn’t get in till the next day. Ross of course managed to get in somehow – I say he broke a window or used some kind of voodoo magic (I punched and pulled at those doors for 20 mins). Last night, the coldest so far, we were out till 2am eating at one of the several restaurants in town with vegetarian food, then going to a midnight showing of Daybreakers. A movie I would recommend the whole family go see. If you don’t agree, tell the woman with the 3 year old above us in this gore fest of a film (that’s a good thing – the gore not the lady and her kid). I seriously considered yelling at the lady to leave before the film started but really, what do I know about raising kids right. He didn’t cry once is all I can say about that – when I was that age I would have been crying and had nightmares for years. I once saw the cover of a horror movie at a video store when I was 9 – and believed in toilet monsters till I was 12. True story, from just the cover.

So.. speaking of procrastination- New Years. What did we do? We actually didn’t do nothing! We instead took the bus that’s right across the street downtown and walked around the waterfront. The waterfront here is far superior to the waterfront in both Portland and Spokane for many reasons. Although it is practically still canal water, it is accessed by walking down stairs to a water alley of cool old buildings and restaurants and absolutely no railing whatsoever to save you from falling into the cold, bacteria filled cesspool; But it looks cool and that is what matters. Along the canal there are stone bridges above periodically that you can access with stairs in order to get to the other side of the canal – most of the bridges are busy streets in the city above. In the water, there are cute little boats similar to gondolas and how appropriate, because it looks like a miniature Venice. I really have no good photos of this because it was night time but I would have liked for you to get the idea of how fearfully close we were forced to the water in the New Years crowd. A constant stream of locals and tourists shoving past you on a narrow piece of sidewalk and crowding outside restaurants waiting for their names to be called made the experience pretty frightening really. I’m not sure (if) how the night was pulled off without at least 40 people in the canal – especially since most of them were drunk.

San Antonio Water Front

San Antonio Water Front

After trying 3 different restaurants and being told that there would be at least an hour and a half wait, we left the canal for less populated eateries. We found Rio Rio – which actually happened to be on the canal as well we later noticed – just on the other side and downstairs. We were surprised it was so empty but after ordering their vegetarian burrito and veggie quesadilla – I mean the spinach on spinach burrito and spinach on spinach on cheese quesadilla we understood. This was the second time we’d ordered a “vegetarian” item in Texas “non vegetarian restaurants” and the second time our food was stuffed to the brim with soggy nasty canned spinach. Apparently Vegetarian and Popeye are synonymous here to restaurants who don’t specifically care about people who don’t eat meat. It’s really a convenient enough addition to any menu, how can they screw it up? food but without meat! What a wacky concept!!!! YET they still cant pull it off. Here is a good veggie burrito for you – Spanish Rice, Beans, Cheese, Pico de Gallo and FRESH spinach – here is a veggie quesadilla – Cheese, Black beans and FRESH spinach. I KNOW that you have those things in your Mexican restaurant kitchen. I think what the problem is, is that they just hate us and want us to never eat at these places again. Done and done.

After that we went towards the funny space needle wanabe thing where the fireworks would be going off, and near our last bus. We made the mistake of asking a police officer where the bus mall is and he kindly directed us to the largest and most packed group of people since Black Friday at a Walmart. It seemed there may be a through way but we were duped and spend the next 20 minutes smelling armpits and stepping on push chairs trying to get out. I cant tell you the number of thick leather, heavily cologned  jackets were shoved into my face nor how we survived but eventually we burst forth from the mass. I wanted and planned for most the time to run like hell as soon as we were free but the crowd of people leaving also bogged us down all the way to the bus stop.. which was a block back. The cop made of go through the crowd for nothing.

New Years was also a blue moon I was told. What does this mean you ask? NOTHING of any SIGNIFICANCE! It means there were 2 fill moons in one month, apparently rare, but mind you these are human months – concepts of time written down by man so for nature, its probably no big deal at all. If you told nature “hey that’s freakin cool!” She would say, “oh that? eh, I guess” and not because she’s modest. Nature has no concept of a 30 day ‘month’ nor a 28 day one. (That was an existentialist rant if anyone was wondering what that was).It was pretty anyway, although not at all blue and not at all special.

New Years Blue moon

We arrived home with no problems, except for the lovely man on the bus listening to music loudly on the world’s worst cell phone/mp3 player.

We have since been working and little more. I should write about work more and probably will. I am officially the only one writing blogs so if you all come here for Ross, you will be disappointed. :)