Collier Seminole State Park

Naples, Florida  (high 84, low 70)

After leaving the Keys, we arrived Sunday afternoon at Collier Seminole  State Park.  It’s on the southern gulf coast of Florida and right off of highway 41.

We arrived at Collier Seminole  without making any reservations. That’s not always the wisest thing to do in Florida in winter, but I had checked Reserve America the day before and saw that they had plenty of longer sites.

We drove through the campground and finally chose site 116.  Once we got into it, we realized it wasn’t very level.  We’ve learned it’s a lot harder leveling a 41 foot motor home than it was to level our 32 footer.  What looks level to they eye, isn’t always level to the motor home.  We decided to live with it, and since our satellite signal locked right on, Al was happy.  He was itching to watch the second half of the Bucs football game.  Unfortunately, they lost.

The initial plan was to spend two nights here, before heading back to the Tampa area.

We wanted to do some hiking and see if we could spot either the Florida Panther or Black bear that live in this area.  We haven’t had any luck with finding either animal. 

Monday morning, we did some hiking in the park, but it was so foggy it was hard to see much of anything.   That afternoon, there were some scattered showers, so we decided to go down to  Marco Island.

We have always wanted to visit Marco Island, because it’s supposed to be a beautiful place.  We were very disappointed.  It would probably have been a wonderful place, years ago,before they filled it in with concrete.  Now, all we saw were  row after row of high rise condo’s.  There was very little of anything natural left.  Even though it is an island, we only saw the water one time, and then it was just a dirty marina.  They built the condo’s so close together (to keep the rif-raf out, I guess)  that you would never have known there was an ocean right there.  We will not go back to Marco Island.

However…..we did find a very nice Beall’s Outlet and managed to pick up some shorts and shirts for both of us, and at very reasonable prices.

We got back to the motorhome and it started to rain.  There is a big weather front forming out in the Gulf and feeding on the warm gulf waters. It just keeps coming, and coming.   It rained pretty hard at times all night long and this morning we had some pretty loud and scary thunder.  I am a real coward when it comes to bad weather.   There is  no way I can sleep when the weather is bad, so I was up most of the night listing to weather alerts and watching the radar on my Droid phone app.   I was afraid there would be some tornados’ spun up from the storm, so I was worried about that.    I did hear there were some tornados in Tampa and the Daytona Beach area, so we were glad we didn’t try to get back to Tampa yesterday.

The rain stopped mid morning , Tuesday, and we finally got outside to survey the damage.  There were a lot of very wet sites and one poor group of Amish people had been in a tent site in what looked like a lake.  The poor people were wringing out all their stuff and moving to another site which was on a little higher ground.   

We decided to extend our stay here until the two weather fronts make their way through Florida. It looks like it won’t be safe to leave until Thursday, so we extended our stay two more nights. 

Unfortunately, our current site is taken for Wednesday night, so we’re moving to site 89 tomorrow. It’s a pull through site, so it should be a quick move.

No one ever said living full time in an Rv is always fun, and this has definitely not been our best few days.