Another Day Off

Today, Saturday, was another day off.  Yesterday was the day off that the SOWERs get, today was the day off that nearly everybody gets.  Two days off in a row.  What fun.  Now if there were only a way to get the entire week off...

Oh, wait...

Chilly morning, great morning to sleep a little longer, make scrambled eggs for breakfast...  I think I managed to sleep in all the way until 6:15.  Deb, however, doesn’t have this problem.  I spent some time using an absolutely crappy Internet connection to research a fraudulent credit card transaction.  Looks like someone ordered something from Wayfair for $988.00.  I can’t wait to see what it is.  Must be really nice.

Now my main credit card doesn’t work because it was disabled, so I’m having another one delivered to the camp on Monday.  Fortunately, I have another one.

We haven’t found a place to kayak within a reasonable distance, so we left the kayaks behind at the camp and drove towards Clermont.  We stopped in Groveland because we spotted a food truck selling donuts.  This area seems to suffer from a lack of good bakeries so we haven’t had a really good donut since last week in Tifton, Georgia.  I got a picture of Deb at the food truck in anticipation of a story about a great donut.

But it was not to be.  The price sounded reasonable, although you had to buy them by the dozen.  Seven bucks for a dozen.  Not bad, until we found out that they were actually mini donuts, barely larger than a quarter.  We moved on.

After hitting a couple of thrift stores on the way, we stopped at a trailhead on the West Orange Trail for lunch.  This was at the very beginning of the West Orange bike trail, called Killarney Station.  The overflow parking lot was empty, perfect for parking the RV.

After lunch we set out on our bikes and headed towards Winter Garden, a few miles away.  But first we rode into Oakland Nature Preserve and stopped for a while to take the short boardwalk hike to Apopka Lake.  Very cool preserve.  We saw a bald eagle soaring not far above us and watched it alight into a large nest in a tree on the other side of the lake.  We also ran into another SOWER couple who were out doing the same thing as us: enjoying the cool but nice day.

Winter Garden is a totally touristy town that I’m sure the locals avoid like the plague.  The downtown was done up very quaint and lovely, with the bike trail going right down the middle of it, almost as if the town grew up around the bike trail.  This, like many towns, started from just a stop on the railroad, and languished when travel by rail went out of style, and again after two years of freezes in the 1980’s gutted the profitability of citrus farming in the area.  The town grew again by transforming itself into a trendy destination.

We rode through Winter Garden, stopping to take a few pictures.  I always have to laugh when a city that never sees snow puts up Winter decorations that include the phrase “Let it snow”.

We rode on for several more miles, eventually turning around when I couldn’t feel my fingers any more.  The wind and the chill had taken its toll.  Also, it was getting later in the day and the temperature was starting to drop.  Deb had gloves along, I did not.  For part of the distance back, I used her gloves to help my hands warm up.

On the way back, we stopped for pizza at Piesanos in Clermont.  It checked several boxes: it was a pizza joint, it had high ratings, it was right along Highway 50, and it had plenty of space to park an RV.  We ordered our pizza and waited.  And waited.  The manager eventually came out and asked us if we were hungry.

Duh!

Apparently there was a mix-up in the kitchen and our pizza was delivered to another table. She offered a complementary appetizer which we accepted.  Two large meatballs smothered in sauce arrived shortly and we made quick work of those.  Yes, we were hungry.  And this helped until the pizza came out.

The pizza was excellent.

We got back to camp well after dark.