Back in Florida

We arrived back at our floating home on Sunday night, Jan 6th, after a fairly uneventful 2-day drive, again, with no bad weather. We had a great three weeks at home over Christmas with lots of snow. So strange to think that will be the extent of winter for us this year!

We feel like we've been in Panama City forever! On Thursday, Jan 10th, it was time to move on.

Heading out into the Gulf we saw these kites but I couldn't see anyone holding the lines on shore. As we went on I saw why. There were two guys riding some kind of a waterboard attached to the kite. Wow, they were really flying! Much too adventurous for me but it was good to see someone was making good use of the 15-20 knot winds because we sure weren't. Guess where the wind was coming from sailors? Of course, out of the east, where we were headed! We are starting to wonder if we'll ever get the right winds for sailing again!

We were on the water a whole six hours, heading east to Port St. Joe, FL. It was a pretty rough motor trip but it felt good to be out on the water again and since it was around 70 degrees and we're still boating in January, who can complain? Here's a scene as we neared Port St. Joe just before sunset. By the way, we just entered the eastern time zone so sunset is around 6pm now. I'm looking forward to longer days, 5pm was a bit early to be tucked in for the night when it got dark.

This marina is the priciest one we've seen so far: $2.10/ft - yikes! That comes to over $80 per night (although the showers ARE much nicer than we've had since southern Illinois). It really seemed high by comparison to the super deal we got at Sun Harbor in Panama City. The dockmaster, David, didn't even charge us for the four extra days we were there beyond our month contract. We're paying almost as much for the two days here as we did for our whole time there - crazy! Paul's brother, Jim, who winters in Florida, says "get used to it".

We'll continue heading east on the panhandle, heading toward Apalachicola, then Carrabelle where we'll make our Gulf crossing to the western shore of Florida. Hopefully we'll get to watch the Packers beat the Seahawks on TV tomorrow. GO PACKERS!!!