Heading to Vero Beach (we hope)

Sweetwater Rv Park, Zephyrhills, Florida

We’re only booked here at Sweetwater through the end of the month, and month end is coming up quickly.

I have been hesitant to make other firm plans because our history of making reservations hasn’t worked well for us.  In fact, since we left home in December, we’ve had to cancel every reservation we made.

We joined Thousand Trails at the Tampa Rv show for the discounted annual rate of $199. We can camp 30 nights for no additional cost.  After the 30 nights, we will pay $3.00 a night.  For an additional $199 we bought a Max Pass that gave us 6 additional campgrounds in Florida.  There were only 3 campgrounds in Florida with the regular membership and we knew we’d be in Florida a lot. 

One of the parks in the Max Pass is in Vero Beach, which is on the Atlantic coast of Florida, a little south of the Tampa bay area.

A disadvantage of Florida in the winter months, is that rv sites are pretty full and you almost have to plan ahead.  

Anyway, we finally decided we needed to firm up some plans.  I went to the Thousand Trails website (not a very good site in my opinion), and went to book a site at Sunshine Travel.  Uh oh…nothing available!  Fortunately I recently spoke to Bonnie at TT for another issue on our account (their bookkeeping leaves a lot to be desired) and I knew the website didn’t actually match what was available.  Sure enough, I called Bonnie again and she said there were 2 sites available, so we booked one from March 1, for 12 nights.  After that we’ll come back to Tampa for a week before we start heading home.  Sunshine Travel looks like a pretty nice park.  It is a snowbird campground though…not like a state park.  We much prefer state parks, but they get quite expensive if you are staying any length of time.   Plus we are getting so we want the sewer hookups!   I don’t know what kind of site we’ll get….we may be at the “back 40”, but the pictures on the website show paved roads and paved sites.

The main attraction is the close proximity to the beach. 

It looks like it’s about 5 miles from Vero Beach and Sebastian Inlet.  There is a lot of good kayaking around and the reefs are close inshore.  It’s still lobster season until the end of March and you can beach dive to collect lobsters :)  Unfortunately, we didn’t bring our dive gear.  We just didn’t have enough room and felt it would be too cold anyway!  The temps have been very warm the past few days (80) so we’re regretting that decision.

Today we have plans to kayak the Weeki Wachee River.  It’s a beautiful clear spring fed river just a bit north of where we are currently staying.  We’ve kayaked there many times and it’s one of our very favorite rivers.  We expect to see otters and manatees, but we’ll have to wait and see.  More later on that…and lots of pictures!