With 3.5 days of hard driving behind us and nothing we had to get up and do first thing this morning, we slept well last night and got up when we were ready.  That turned out to be around 7:30 AM, but that was two hours later than the last few mornings.  We had a leisurely start to the morning and eventually went on a walkabout to explore the Williston Crossings RV Resort and the town of Williston, Florida.

Besides the beautiful landscaping, the high quality of the sites/infrastructure, the excellent Wi-Fi, and the nice people we have met so far (staff and residents) one of the things we like about Williston Crossings RV Resort is that it appears to be very quiet and relaxed even though lots of people are out and about.  The people parked next to us, for example have an outside TV.  They were watching it at 7 AM this morning while smoking, which they do constantly, but we never heard the TV and we never smelt the smoke.  We only knew they were there because we looked out our window and saw them.

A couple of bonus features we discovered included the recycling program and the RV/Car Wash station, available for use at no extra charge.  Another plus is that the resort is walking distance from Williston, a city of 2,200 residents (not including the RV Resort).  We walked downtown this morning and discovered a grocery store, two drug stores, two hardware stores, and a variety of non-chain eateries.  When we got back we walked the RV Resort and took pictures.  Our estimate is that there are at least 600 sites here so there are, or will be, at least half as many people staying at the RV park during January and February as live in Williston.  It’s a BIG park, but you can only see limited portions of it from any given vantage point, so it has much more intimate feel to it.

We also checked out a possible different site (#439) that was available in the old section of the resort and decided to move our reservation to that site.  The pull-through site we originally reserved for January – March was in the new section where the tree cover is sparse to non-existent, making the sites much more exposed to the sun.  Site #439 is a back-in rather than a pull-through which will save us $400 over the three months we are here.  The main reason for moving, however, was that it has the mature trees of the older section, including Live Oaks draped with Spanish moss, which will provide a more attractive setting while affording us good shade from the sun.  By the time we got back to our coach we had walked about 6,000 steps.  At 2 feet/step that was 12,000 feet or a little over two miles.  At 2.5 feet/step it was 15,000 feet, or just under three miles.  Either way, we would not have done that at home with temperatures in the mid 20s and lots of snow on the ground.

The north end of the resort is still under development and the landscaping is sparse compared to the south (older) end.  We were told that the northwest corner is being developed with sites that can be purchased.  The roads and utilities are in, but most of the sites have not been paved and landscaped.  This part of the resort is closer to the club house, swimming pool, and pavilion.  At the center of the north section are three full size train cars and a caboose.  We do not know what plans the owners have these but they are badly in need of restoration.

The nearest cities of any size are Gainesville (20 miles) and Ocala (25 miles).  Gainesville is a college town.  It has a Trader Joe’s, a few “health food” stores, several farmers markets, and a Panera so we will be making that trip occasionally for items we cannot find in Williston.  We are looking forward to eating a lot of locally sourced fruits and vegetables while we are here.  The Nutrition Facts daily video reports for the last few days have been about recent studies on the remarkable properties of berry fruits.  It’s worth checking out.

We were surprised this morning when we got an “access denied” message when we tried to view the Nutrition Facts video.  Nutrition Facts uses YouTube to make their videos available and had a problem a few weeks ago with a false report of “offensive/inappropriate content” which shut them down for 24 hours until they got it straightened out with the powers that be.  We weren’t sure at first if this had happened again or if we were being blocked from getting to YouTube by the resorts Wi-Fi system.  A quick check of YouTube directly indicated that the resort was apparently blocking YouTube.  As large as the resort is, it is understandable that they don’t want people streaming video content, and YouTube would be an obvious site to block.

(Opinion: People who abuse the ability to report offensive or inappropriate content of YouTube by making false claims should themselves be barred from ever using YouTube again.)  Nutrition Facts is now backing up their collection of almost 800 videos to another service (Vimeo, I think) as a precaution against this happening in the future.

Verizon Mi-Fi to the rescue!  We always try to use Wi-Fi when it’s available but we have the Mi-Fi device for just those situations where we can’t.  As long as we were powering up the Mi-Fi device we did a little experiment:  Instead of connecting to it directly, we had the Wi-Fi Ranger connect it and then connected our computers to the Wi-Fi Ranger.  Bingo, worked like a charm.  More to the point, we were able to watch the Nutrition Facts dot Org video.

We connected back to the resort Wi-Fi system and turned off the Mi-Fi.  I then downloaded a new version of a program that was 84 MB without objection from the resort Wi-Fi system.  Linda renewed a few memberships that we had not taken care of before we left and I continued to work on cleaning up e-mail.  Adobe has an interesting offer available to anyone who wants it for Photoshop CC (creative cloud) and Lightroom 5; $9.99/month with a minimum one year contract.  But you have to order by December 31^st.  They are no longer going to sell these programs, so if you want them, this is how you will have to get them.  You can install on two computers under the terms and conditions.  Renewals will be at “current prices”, so no guarantee it that the price will remain at present level.

I did not order it yet as some of the features appear to require a 64 bit operating systems (Win 7, 8, or Mac).  That works on Linda’s laptop, but not mine.  I downloaded a new version (18.0) of WinZip this morning, only to discover that it would not install on anything less that MS Vista.  I like my existing Dell laptop computer, and I like Windows XP Pro SP 3, but it’s becoming all too clear that I am going to have to get a new machine, probably sooner rather than later.  Ugh.  In the world of computing one of my least favorite things is the process of moving to a new operating system.

It was pleasantly warm today, in the lower 80s, and bit humid but with a light breeze, so we wanted something light for dinner.  Linda walked back to the local grocery store to pick up some fresh greens for a dinner salad and few odds and ends from the drug store.  Around 3 PM the grounds crew passed through our area and used a leaf blower to clean the patio portion of our concrete pad.  Nice touch.  They also mentioned to Linda that the reason the current occupant was vacating site #439 was because one of the adjacent neighbors liked to build a fire every evening and he didn’t like the smoke.  We often have campfires at night when we are camping in cooler weather, but decided to check that out after it got dark.  We did not see any obvious problem, but we will investigate a little further tomorrow.