Wednesday – December 18, 2013
Miccosukee Resorts & Gaming Casino
Miami, Florida
We bid adieu to the Ocean Pond Campground in the Osceola National Forest near Lake City, Florida. This has been our home for the past six days. The weather here for the past two days has been sunny days with temperatures in the mid to high 60’s.
We said our good-byes to new as well as old friends: Ken and Helen of Vermont who travel in their motorhome and Roger and his wife from Ontario, Canada who travel in their trailer. We first met these folks here in March 2012. New friends, Brad and Jan are originally from New Hampshire but now call Rhode Island home. They have been campers for the past 14 years. They have a Ford, full size van camper, that serves as their homebase away from home. It has been outfitted with a solar panel they use to power their electrical requirements, including their Television and Direct TV satellite. They usually winter in southern California and Mexico, but decided to spend the winter in Florida this year, due to his wife having a health problem that requires her to be in Rhode Island on January 20, 2014.
We departed Lake City, Florida at 12:10 p.m., after washing our Casita Trailer at a car wash. We had washed our Ford E-150 Cargo Van at the same car wash on Tuesday. It felt good to get rid of the road grime we had accumulated on both vehicles from the nasty weather we had encountered in southern Illinois.
Our destination today is the Everglades National Park in southern Florida. It is a little over a 400-mile drive, so we plan to stop for the night somewhere along the way. Our route took us on I-75 south to the Florida Turnpike, which is the shortest route there.
The Florida Turnpike Plazas did not provide a suitable area to spend the night, in our opinion, so we chose to search for an alternative location on our smartphone. As we were approaching Miami, Sharon happened to remember a casino we had passed on our previous trips to the Everglades. We arrived at the Miccosukee Resort & Gaming Casino at 7:20 p.m. It is located at the intersection of FL-997 and US-41. They have a large parking area for RV’s with 24-hour roaming security. We settled in for a night of rest among several other RV’s.
Total miles traveled today: 408
Tomorrow another adventure begins.
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