Wash and wax at Paradise Oaks
Live auction
Losing plane
We spent 5 nights at the Paradise Oaks RV Resort in Bushnell FL. The reason for being there was the Escapees Chapter 57 (the “Florida Sun Gators” chapter) rally. We were newly-minted members of this chapter, having just forked over our $20 for a 5-year membership. Attending the rally cost another $30. But for the total of $34 ($30 plus the $4 for this year) we got to meet a bunch of great RV people, eat lots of food, bid on some charity auction items (more on this later) and make some paper airplanes.
Yes, one of the big events was a paper airplane building/flying contest. I thought this would be right up my engineering alley but I failed miserably. I just couldn’t get it to fly in a straight line or for a long distance. Since I didn’t get any awards I had to settle for having fun.
It was a very good time and we are glad we went.
We also took the opportunity to give the RV a wash and wax (see the photo above). It had been a tough trip south and was pretty darn dirty. I think we carried mud all the way from Chenango Shores. It looks great now and won’t be embarrassing when we take up residence in our new home in Ft Myers.
Becky and the chapter flag
Paradise Oaks is a very nice park. However, it is really two different parks: a park for long-term residents and a park for transients. Yes, they share the common facilities, which are very nice – a large meeting room and several smaller meeting rooms, a huge exchange library, an exercise room, a laundromat, a pool room and a dog park. It has a beautiful swimming pool with hot tub, 4 pickleball courts, shuffleboard courts and a 9-hole disc golf course. I tried the disc golf course and it wasn’t very good. Two holes appeared to be missing and none of the tees were marked, so I will call it a disc golf course in name only.
However, the transient area has one thing that the residential area does not have: ear-splitting train noise. A heavily used rail line runs very close to the boundary of the transient area and those trains run 24/7. Several times during our stay I was awakened at 3 or 4 am with a loud blast of a train horn that seemed to be next door.
The transient area also lacks one thing that the residents have: cable TV. We had no cable TV and almost no OTA TV. Two useless English channels and one even more useless Spanish channel.
Both areas had some nice sunsets.
Nice sunset