Novapalooza - lite

 I went to a high school named Nova and one of my classmates, Alex, has a talent for getting people together. She has property near Gainesville, FL and we love parking our RV there. When she is able to gather classmates together, she calls it NovaPalooza! We've attended twice before, once in 2012 and again in 2015. She had hoped to put together an event for 2020 but a global pandemic brought that to a full stop. It will be late 2021, or maybe 2022 before that happens now. 

Meanwhile, we keep hearing about our friends - mostly over age 65 - getting vaccinated. That paves the way for real get-togethers again! When one - Jeff - successfully beat not one, but two bouts of cancer, Alex wanted to celebrate and she put out the word and 3 days of a Palooza-lite began. 

A core member of the group is Cary Tennis who now lives in Italy. He actually considered getting on a plane to be here, but his doctor said no. He is still recovering from a bout of Covid. (read his story here) So, we did what we've been doing all year and brought him in via Zoom. Here we are in Alex's living room with Cary from Italy and Arynne from California on the TV ...

The need to get away - scratching that itch

 As much as we like our townhouse in Fort Lauderdale and as much as we've been enjoying this year+ of alone time, there's still a big part of us that is bothered. We have a need to get away, do something different. Thank goodness, our friend Chloe, gave us a reason to do just that.

Chloe lives in North Carolina and runs Big Mill Bed and Breakfast where we've stayed a few times. In her past life, she lived on boats all over the Bahamas as did her friend, Joy. These days they make a point of traveling to the Florida Keys for a week each year to get their boat fix. They booked a condo thru VRBO and invited Jim and me to join them for a night or two. It took us all of 30 seconds to say, "Sure!"

Jim and Chloe

We drove our camper van down to the keys, but we took them up on the offer of the bedroom in the condo to sleep for the night. It takes less than 2 hours to drive to the north/middle keys but you really feel like you getting away. 

The first night, they took us out for a sunset boat ride.

Chris and Chloe - I like to ride in the bow

Jim and Joy - Jim likes boats from the captain's point of view

The next day, we went to lunch by boat to a "Keys-perfect-funky" place called Robbie's. One of the main attractions is all the Tarpon - BIG fish - that swarm around the dock waiting to be fed. That also attracts one of my favorite birds - the pelican. With Joy's help, I remembered all the words to the poem I used to recite as a kid:

A marvelous bird is the pelican
His beak can hold more than his belly can
His beak can hold all of his food for a week
And I don't know how in the hell he can