Jeff (singer) | The Phase Place

“Welcome to Lake Williston.” We had a LOT of rain starting around 7:00 PM last evening. It continued through the night and into today, with an occasional rumble of thunder and periods of heavy downpour. We also had a tornado watch until 5 PM.

The drainage at Williston Crossings RV Resort is generally good, but there are always going to be low spots that collect water. The road in front of our site becomes a shallow river during moderate rain and a lake when the rain is heavy, so we had waterfront property for a while today. 🙂 The rain was like a tropical monsoon at times.

We took care of shopping and outside chores yesterday and did not have to leave the rig today if we did not want to, so we spent the morning inside our small but cozy home away from home. OK, it’s not that small, but it is a lot smaller than a house, and Linda gets cabin fever much more easily than I do. By mid-late morning she needed to go for a walk. There was a lull in the rain so she put on her raincoat and headed out. The rain resumed before she could get back to the coach, but she enjoyed it just the same.

I was so pleased the other day with the Imsanity image resizing plug-in that I decided to test the Image Watermark plug-in today. This plug-in is used to add a custom watermark to images uploaded to a WordPress site, and one of its key features is the ability to watermark images that have already been uploaded to the WP Media Library. I configured the settings for the plug-in and tried to add a watermark image to one of my recently uploaded photos, but it didn’t work.

I went to the support forum at www.dfactory.eu looking for some documentation. The documentation was very thin but it is a fairly simple plug-in to use, at least conceptually, so that was not a complete surprise. I checked the “bugs” forum and found that I was not the first or only person to have this exact problem. The plug-in author provided guidance on how to get this feature to work but following his advice to the letter did not work. The plug-in was recommended to me by Technomadia, who use it successfully on all their website/blog images. Based on the info in the support forum, it apparently works just fine when the watermark is applied as the image is uploaded into WordPress, but not after it is already in the WP Media Library.

By mid-afternoon the clouds broke up, revealing blue skies above and allowing sunshine to penetrate all the way to the ground, so we went for a walk around the RV resort. I guess we were not the only ones who felt cooped up by the weather as there were a lot of people out walking. There is a Carriage owners rally here starting on Monday and participants have been dribbling in since Thursday. They will reportedly have 60 – 70 5th Wheel RVs attending. More arrived today and the bulk of them will arrive tomorrow with last minute arrivals on Monday.

Approximately 35 seasonal residents left on March 1^st. A few others have left during the month and quite a few more are pulling out just ahead of the new arrivals. As a result we are seeing new faces in noticeable numbers for the first time since we got here. We are also seeing an increase in young children in the park. During the winter season this is an “adult” park, although no one seems to object to grand-parents having their grand-children visit. But from approximately April 1 to November 1 it functions more like a normal RV park, allowing families with children and hosting rally groups like most RV parks and campgrounds. Business is business, after all. The carriage rally goes all week and they will have the exclusive use of the clubhouse for their activities. By the time we pull out of here on Monday, April 7, the resort will likely have a very different look and feel.

It wouldn’t be Saturday night at Williston Crossings RV Resort without the fire pit and “Smitty” on guitar and vocals. Jeff brought his guitar too and they played and sang a lot of songs together as well as each ding solo numbers. A much larger group gathered this evening, with over 40 people at one time, and 50 or more total. The group included a number of children and young adults, the first time we have seen that many at the campfire. Winter is definitely turning into spring here.

Having spent a long day Thursday visiting Pat and Vickie at Fort Wilderness, and with the weather still wet and cool, we stayed around our coach on Friday and relaxed. Linda worked on her cross stitch for much of the day. I did a load of laundry. We went for a walk around the RV resort. We met another group of campers from Michigan and stopped to chat briefly. Linda made her wonderful vegan pancakes for dinner and then we went to the fire pit at 6:30 PM. We visited briefly with Kevin, who is in charge of the fire pit, before he took off to play Texas Hold’em. John and Ali, our next door neighbors to the east, were there as they are every Friday and Saturday night. A few other folks showed up, but not as many as we have seen in past weeks, and they did not stay. By 8:30 PM it was just the four of us and we had a nice, long visit. Kevin came back after Texas Hold’em and visited for a little while before turning in. I’ve included a photo gallery at the end of this post rather than insert the photos inline.

This morning we awoke to temperatures in the upper 40’s with dense fog, but the forecast was for a high near 80 degrees with only a 30% chance of rain. We waited until noon for the temperatures to rise into the mid-60’s and then headed for Gainesville. We had two State Parks to check out plus some shopping to do.

Our first stop was the Devil’s Millhopper State Geological Park. A small park on the NW side of Gainesville, Florida the Devil’s Millhopper is a sinkhole to drains water back into the Florida aquifer. It is 500 feet across at the top and 120 feet deep. Water flows in from streams that become waterfalls, and seeps out of the steep side walls. A wooden staircase gets you from the top to the bottom and back up while keeping hikers from destroying the vegetation which leads to serious erosion.

About 6 miles farther west on the same road is the trailhead for the hiking trails in the southern section of the San Felasco Hammock Preserve State Park. The southern 2/3rds of the park is restricted to hiking only with over 12 miles of trail. The area is pine flatwoods, with sinkholes and ponds and was the site of a Spanish mission a long, long time ago. We went for a very pleasant three mile hike and rarely saw anyone else on the trail in spite of a very crowed parking lot at the trailhead.

My birthday is on Tuesday, and rather than make a special trip into Gainesville for dinner, we decided to dine out while we were there today. Our hike completed, we drove to Karma Cream, a vegan friendly ice cream / pastry / sandwich shop on the north edge of the University of Florida campus. We ordered a Tofurkey Rueben sandwich and a vegan “bacon” and Tofurkey club sandwich. We each had a half of each sandwich. Karma Cream has a good selection of non-dairy and dairy ice cream. Linda had chocolate peanut butter and I had a Sunday with Lunaberry ice cream, dark chocolate hot fudge, whip cream, and crushed peanuts; all vegan. Karma Cream is a hole-in-the-wall kind of place, staffed and patronized by college students many of whom had tattoos, but we enjoyed it. It has a four and half cow rating on Happy Cow, and we felt that was an accurate assessment.

Just around the corner from Karma Cream is the Gainesville Earth Origins organic market, so we did our weekly grocery shopping there rather than at the Publix supermarket. By the time we got back to our coach and put the groceries away it was time to go to the Saturday night campfire. Even though the humidity was high, the milder temperatures brought out the crowd. Jeff and John brought their guitars and played/sang some of their favorite country songs. While country I not our preferred genre, we appreciated their musicianship and willingness to entertain their fellow RVers. We can only sit for so long on hard chairs and made our exit from the campfire around 8:30 PM.