Valentines To You

Happy Valentine’s Day! I hope you all have someone special to share the day with. Even if it’s just your pet goldfish.

After my walk, I did a little cleaning and then the phone rang. It was Pat at Dollywood. We talked a little and we are now employees! We’ll exchange paperwork, and get a start date. Because we are attending the RV-Dreams Rally in Sevierville, Tennessee from April 11-17, we said our availability date was April 18. Dollywood is right down the highway in Pigeon Forge, so we will start searching RV campgrounds to stay for 3 months. Working in concessions should be interesting. At least we have a pants and shirt outfit to wear. Stay tuned for more developments…

It was Valentine’s Day, so Donna and Ron and we picked up Casey after work as promised and drove over to his new home in Sherwood Forest RV Resort. Gary and I had planned on looking there for our six month stay, but it was more expensive and more crowded than Kissimmee South. However, their new site is even nicer than the one here. There are along the edge of property with a tiny flowing brook behind them, lots of trees for a buffer on their patio side and a deep lot. We hung out there a while, and talked about traveling. They had lived in Arizona for a year before arriving in Florida, so they knew lots of far-out places to see. I copiously took notes. Terry asked if we had hiking sticks to which I replied ‘not yet’. He showed us one he had made out of a yucca plant. When yuccas bloom, they sent up a tall – sometimes 25 foot – stalk that blooms near the top. They are very sturdy, and his was sanded, polyurethaned, with a leather thong wrapped around the top for a grip, and decorated with some beads and feathers. They offered me one that they had roughly sanded and now we have a new project! Thanks, guys! I’ll show you pictures when we start sanding.

Anyhow, we decided to all go out to Chile’s for dinner and we had a very entertaining waiter, which made it even more fun. Then we decided to go to Pure Magic – an ice cream store with a twist. You can choose two size cups and as many flavors as you want. They start with a metal mixing bowl, pumping the ice cream base into the bottom. Then they hold it under a giant can of liquid nitrogen and turn on the power. Clouds of ‘steam’ roll over the bowl as he brings it back and starts adding your chosen ingredients. Gary and I chose caramel coffee fudge almond. He stirs it up, then adds some more LN. The end result is a huge container of ice cream. We couldn’t even finish it, but boy, it was good! Pictures to follow.
Tuesday was even warmer and sunnier, and the men talked for a while outside under the awning, until we decided we would try Taco Bell and Walmart on Rte. 27. After Taco Bell, back on 27 North some police cars, ambulances and State patrol cars came screaming by and the traffic stopped. Just up ahead (we heard on a trucker CB) a log truck had jackknifed onto the median and turned over spilling logs everywhere. I tried to get a photo with our dumb camera and you can just see the cab of the truck.
We were sure he had died in that wreck. There were two news helicopters hovering over in about 10 minutes. Amazingly, we got by. We did our Walmart thing, but it took 20 minutes to get back onto Hwy 27 from the parking lot. And, we were low on gas. We crawled to where we noticed they were diverting all traffic off of 27. That was a good thing for us and we made it all the way to Davenport before we got gas. Later that evening we heard that the driver had sustained only minor injuries!

Donna cooked up some Fettuccini Alfredo with shrimp and broccoli and I contributed a salad. Yummy. She even bought a tiny cheesecake like my birthday cake for dessert. Didn’t need that, but ate it anyway. (Four miles tomorrow morning!) We talked for a while, yawns and goodnights. We’re playing mini-golf tomorrow at Disney World. Gary finally gets to hold a golf club!