#297 Venture Out Resort , Cudjoe Key

Well, we finally got here and it is very beautiful. We liked being like 10 feet from the water's edge. We can kayak or fish or whatever we want.

When we first arrived, they gave me a long speech about how my rig and my truck will never fit on the site, it's just impossible.

They told me that there was overflow parking at $2 a day that was available and I needed to probably do that. I just said you know well I will cross that bridge happily very soon but first, can I just take a look at the site see how it goes?

They said several times you may certainly take a look at it but I can guarantee you it will never fit and you will never make it work. The security guard gave hopped in the golf cart and escorted me down to the RV site.

We got to the site and it was just wonderful. It was a comfy wide site and has a little vegetation on the boundary for Bert to hide in. It has a dock and a boat stabilizer thing if you own a boat. It was just pretty dang nice.

I began to back in and the security guard was great at helping me get in there. I've tried several different angles and finally, I went straight because that was the most normal thing to do. Not only did I get it in there just fine I plenty of room to put the truck. When it was over it seemed like a lot of hype about how it would never fit when it wasn't even a problem at all. We settled in and observed that there's a steady breeze and that's nice because that means there's no bugs. After a while, you realize it’s about 10 miles an hour or more every day all day.

Sometimes it's a bit much because it never stops but then it will calm down sometimes to a dead calm for half day. It's a little weird but I tell myself in the middle of the Atlantic on a little spit of land so it might be windy you think.

Now that I've done this, I don't think I could stay anywhere else if I was at the Keys. Now that I've been there and done that if I can't be waterfront, I don't think I would do it at all. Maybe one day we'll try to a stay year. I just hope that if we do it'll be easy going with Bert because that's the biggest variable. Will he behave or will we have to tell him he can't go out.

Some days Bert's more easygoing than others. Right now he works third shift. We make him stay in all day and behave but as soon as it gets dark can go out all night and do anything he wants.

The biggest reason why I don’t think we could do it for a year is the word HOA. I just don't like people crawling up inside me telling me what to do. They got a big book of rules and it makes it look very intimidating. So far on day 14, I haven't had any trouble with making the HOA mad or anything.

We went up the Key West to go to a movie and do a church service on Sundays. We go to Big Pine to get your recovery meetings on Wednesday. It's just a nice place. We sit out in the morning and I take pictures of sunrise. We set out in the evening and look at the Moon. I go out in my kayak paddling about and went fishing a little bit.

Time seems to slow down right now as we've been here two weeks but to me, it feels like a month, I think that's good.

I noticed on the way up here from Marathon I was trying to find out why my cruise control doesn't work under load that is when I’m towing the RV.

It tends to work with just a truck only. I read up on the internet yesterday and it said a vacuum line might be broken and sure enough there was a vacuum line hissing. When I fixed the vacuum line it just got really bad and the transmission started slipping badly.

I figured it was an electronic thing because everything's controlled by a computer these days.

I thought it might be a bad relay but anyway I eventually took it to a guy and he says you need a new transmission. We've been without the truck for about a week now as it's being repaired. Without any wheels, I've been riding my bike some. I had a package to pick up at the post office about two and a half miles away. I rode the bike down there it was all good. There is an asphalt bike trail for a whole lot of the way and then there was one part where you just had a bike lane on the shoulder of the highway that was kind of creepy.

Every few days l go down to the corner grocery store about three miles away on the bike. I'm trying not to make any gigantic grocery trips because everything's about twice as high as it should be. The closest real grocery store is in Key West about 20 miles away. Publix.

I imagined what it would be like to live here doing electrical service calls. That would be absolutely the best.

We know what we're doing this year and that's going generally back to Wilmington for 6 months and helping Ben a little bit finishing the bus. At Thanksgiving then back to Florida. We might make a left and go out towards Nebraska or see the middle of the country. We're not sure but it feels right to do that. If we take a notion maybe the following year, I might end up staying at the Keys all year. I would work part-time but it has to be waterfront buddy. The place I am looking for may not exist. I would like it if someone had a piece of land on the water and had a house like on Magnum PI. I would park out back in the RV and fish kayak and be the onsite handyman for the wealthy guy in the big house. Maybe someday Ill find Higgins.

Each day I try to fix something on the rig or make an improvement. It's still new and I've been working on a new ladder around back. I want to use the ladder to haul a kayak on and make it cooler. I want to improve on the bike rack. I am working on my outdoor kitchen and there are many things to do.

Anytime we're at a site for a while I call it an oasis. It's where you get everything fixed. I have finished the project of the inverter and the transfer switches, solar panels, and all that.

I paid a guy to come out to figure out what was wrong with my air conditioner in the bedroom. It would run for 2 minutes and even though the room was still hot it would cut off. It would do this in an endless cycle but it would never run long enough to cool the room. The guy went up and down the ladder to the roof many times trying this and that. He thought it was a bad circuit board. He went to go get one, came back and that wasn’t it. After a while, he realized the unit sends cold air down to the storage area using the wall cavity as a duct. The thermostat is mounted on this wall that has 55-degree air flowing down it. The cold air was tricking the thermostat into being satisfied every two minutes. I and the checkbook paying the guy got that figured out. What a drag that I had to pay money for Keystone Montana’s bad design ideas.

I can assure you one thing sitting here all day doing this and that looking out over the water in the Keys is a thing that I enjoy and I realize I have got a great life.

When I first dropped off the truck I brought my bike and attached it to the city bus and rode the bike over Key West just to learn how things are and I enjoyed that a lot.

Now that I have been to the Keys I have had an epiphany. If I can't have waterfront, I don't think I will bother.

I used to think so if you just give me a parking lot somewhere, I would be so happy just to be in the Keys.

If you would just let me put my RV in the long-term storage at the airport I wouldn't care because I would be at the Keys.

Once we even considered being at a low rent trailer park. We would be really crammed together with people who only had one tooth and that doesn’t seem appealing, even if it’s the Keys.

It’s a bit of any eye opener but there is the very rich and very poor at the Keys. Utilizing the city bus system allowed me to meet some people who were really struggling. I sometimes think people come here on spring break and stay drunk for 20 years and end up on the bus we are riding. Now they're 40 with a grocery cart and a sleeping bag and they look 70 years old.

For me, having access to the water is kind of everything.

Being at place where you have to get in your little golf cart or walk to the water or drive your car to the water pay $5 to put in is not me.

I don't even want to be down at the end of a canal. I want to be Waterfront or let's not bother at all.

I realize this is a luxurious problem.

While staying at Cudjoe, we go to Key West once or twice a week to just do things and we like to go to The UU Church or a movie, etc. We're having our truck worked on this week and so we've had to learn a little bit about how to ride the city bus.

I was telling India but it's good for us because for us it's like some kind of an experiment almost like a game of how to do what we want to do without having to get an Uber or Rent-A-Car. For our purposes, we chose not to do Uber or rent a car that our needs are not that great. We just occasionally ride the bus when we have to. The first day on the bus I did it I found myself with a handful of elderly people. Most seemed to have lost their way. Listening to them chatting it up to each other but how their disability money came through or how it's all going to be okay. Some young people about middle school age but a lot of the people on the bus seemed like they were the sort of the people that had been having been dealt the tough card.

Then there's the guy that looks kind of like a hippie but no offense to hippy's but and he's just sort of asleep on his guitar and he falls over now and then. Who knows what his story is but I guess it's like I'm going to go to Key West man it's going to be great and then instead of leaving and going back home he just stayed for a long time and stayed drunk for a very long time in the next thing it been a few years.

I also saw the guy laying on the park bench in Key West asleep and just thinking Margaritaville it is but this is more than just a weekend of partying. You just never left and now you're 35 or 40 and oh my God.

I was telling India that unlike myself it's like none of these people are doing this because it's an experiment or because it's interesting or an alternative. This is their life and they don't have a choice because that's the only way they can get around.

I was watching one lady who paid some of the bus fare money in change. She was probably 20 something and the bus driver said well that's not going to quite cut it. She went back to her seat and got a few more coins and put them in and then he allowed her to ride.

We stopped at one stop for some lady and she looked like she was struggling a little bit. She got up on the bus with some baggage and served the driver piece of paper. My guess is it was a voucher and he looked at it and said that’s no good. She tried several expired tickets and finally, she got back off the bus and never rode.

It's entirely possible that she was showing him a piece of paper and saying do you go here and he was saying no this is not the right bus. For some reason, I got the impression it was a voucher and she had run out of merits or tokens or something.

Being able to read is important

On April 14th we were going to go up to Key West to go to the church service that starts at 11. We walk one mile from the RV site through the complex out the gate up the road to Highway 1. You take a left and there's a bus stop. To get to the service on time we needed to catch a bus at 9:15. I didn't want to oversleep so we got up at 7. We decided if we left the house at 8:20 we would have 45 minutes to get there and be early and it takes 30 minutes to walk. We timed it so we would get there at about 5 till 9,15 or 20 minutes early.

We sat down at the bus shelter and we started thinking about it and I wanted to get the app showing the live transit map. I found the location of the bus so we know when he would be there and I saw no bus coming my way.

You choose the bus route and it would say right where you are and the bus will be here at 11 a.m. That's not possible because there should be one in a minute.

I look at the PDF that I downloaded on the bus schedules. It prints out it got two Graphics one is the northbound going towards Marathon and one in south bound going towards Key West. What I had done as I looked at the stop where we are called Cudjoe key. Starting from top to bottom looking at the northbound route I followed the columns straight down and it said 9:15 am. The columns were not lined up perpendicularly so I misread northbound and southbound the stops were not exactly lined up for each other.

I can't say how disappointed I was and I'm sitting here with India just wondering what in the heck am I going to do now because this was our whole day.

I looked at it in Uber and it would cost $60 one way to go to Key West.

I looked at Turo which is a Rent-A-Car place from personal people that we have done. It was about $50 but the availability was Monday only.

None of these were good options even if we decide to go to Big Pine Methodist it would be like $30 for an Uber.

I guess the next part of the story is where I feel like I grew a little bit emotionally. I wouldn't say it's always such a great idea but one of the ways that I'm wired and it's that if something bad happens you try to offset it was something good to make the bad go away. There was the temptation to just take the expensive Uber all the way to Key West and just say okay well so we spent too much money once but that would be weird.

Then I said well we could try to go to Key West and go to the movie because then that would be at least something to do but we have to still wait two hours for the bus to come and it’s a mile back to the RV.

The only restaurants nearby to go to breakfast would be Mangrove Mamas at 3 miles away too far to walk no bus for an hour and a half and an Uber would be 15 $20. It occurred to me the more I talk about these options that I was grasping for something good to make the bad go away. What I needed to do was just let's just walk back to the RV and say I read the chart wrong and call it a day. This is not my strong suit. I couldn't come up with anything interesting to offset the bad. This type of thinking is why people like me drink heavily.

I had seen some signs for a pool party at the resort at 2 p.m. I hesitated because we went to a little cookout one time a year prior. I doubt anybody meant anything by it but everybody had a click and they were chatting it up big-time. It was just me and India and you know people weren't overly talkative to us and us just kind of felt like outsiders. We could have tried harder and almost forced a conversation with somebody but it just seemed like everybody knew everybody and we knew nobody. It wasn't a great feeling so I wasn't jumping up and down about the pool party.

I had an idea that would be sort of a treat that would make it not be a total bust. Maybe order a pizza and they would deliver it and that would seem special.

Well, that was the idea that one and it was fun and it was delicious. In order to make the minimum, we ordered some wings. Everything was fine really but I guess the growth came from just not having to go into town at great expense to win. We just had to lose this time.

The lesson was to learn how to read a bus schedule.

I didn't like how it felt grasping and so being desperate to do something to offset the mistake. I was glad I had finally let it go.

I watched some of my Sunday shows like Meet the Press and such. Eventually, India and I took a little nap. We call this our digesting time.

Later on in the day, I kept thinking I might go out on my kayak a little bit but never quite did.

I worked on my ladder kayak project for an hour or so and the next thing you know it was getting on towards dusk. There was a nice breeze and some pretty color in the sky. I spoke to India and said maybe she should come outdoors and have a nice hot tea with me. We did and Bert joined us. It got dark and after a bit, she went on inside and I finished up the ladder project with my headlamp.

I’ve noticed that there's not much public access to the water. You can usually find a little place somewhere on the side of the highway or under a bridge, but they don't really make it super easy for the public to put in or enjoy the water. There are almost no public beaches. If you don't have water, you ain't nobody. Don't get me wrong this is just my opinion I don't care what anybody else does.

Being a place where you have to get in your little golf cart or walk to the water or drive your car to the water pay $5 to put in is not me. I realize this is a luxurious problem.

I’ve noticed that there's not much public access to the water. You can usually find a little place somewhere on the side of the highway or under a bridge, but they don't make it super easy for the public to put in or enjoy the water. There are almost no public beaches. If you don't have water, you ain't nobody. Don't get me wrong this is just my opinion I don't care what anybody else does.

I keep toying with the idea of staying all year in 2 years or so. Would Bert drive us crazy or would he be just fine? He's doing good so far. He certainly has a wandering desire but he stays in most all day with only a little outside time bit now and then. I think it's some of the newnesses has worn off. He'll stay under our rig some instead of looking for the grass that's greener mostly.

It was a Monday when we put our truck into the shop to have the transmission replaced on Tuesday. There was optimism that he could start as early as Wednesday afternoon early. I guess it's the same as contracting in that there's so much to do and only so many hands and feet and hours to do it in. He had not started but had hoped to be finished on Monday.

Monday came and went Wednesday came and went and eventually he finished up and it was ready for pickup on Friday a little after lunch. We were without the vehicle for what seems like about 2 weeks. The guy that did the work was a good mechanic and I trust his work it just took him forever to get it done. He's short-handed and kept on having an issue that he couldn't quite figure out. On Wednesday he said I got it, he said it was a dumb mistake. He felt stupid for not catching it but we got that behind is picked up the truck and are kind of back to normal.

We discussed me coming back the following week and getting the truck air conditioner to work properly. There was a power steering leak that had nothing to do with the transmission work he was going to fix.

I went back and took care of all that the following week and he got all those issues fixed. Transmissions aren't free but he had quoted 3000. He did a lot of unrelated troubleshooting like probably three hours’ worth. He answers the phone every time I called and I'm pestered him plenty. I was pleased when the bill came, he charged 300 less than he had quoted so I thought that was a pretty stand-up thing to do.

For the rest of our trip at Cudjoe we just kind of enjoyed going into Key West for our recovery meetings and The UU church. We went to a museum and the historical district, Hemingway’s residence, and things like that.

Another fun thing was I had ordered something a kayak sail online.

I attached it to the kayak and went out many days consecutively learning about it. I would paddle into the wind as hard as I could and then sail back.

It was quite a learning curve and there’s very little control other than just flying at full sail.

I'm trying to think of how to convert it into a mini sailboat so I can tack and steer it much better.

I continued working on the RV by installing the rear-view camera system and making sure that we were ready to leave out on May 8th.

I feel like we finally decided that there would be no reason to consider staying here for a whole year in the future.

A part of me likes the idea but without any vegetation or woods around Bert’s having a hard time just living on pure concrete and asphalt. It's very enjoyable in many ways but for what they charge to live here I guess I'll just have to find a water view that's not 3000 a month in the winter. I can change my mind could live behind Higgins's house someday so never say never.

I found that you have to pay 1500 per month for an RV site which has water front access which is twice my comfort range. What i found weird is there are other parks but with no view and no access at all at 1200 and more just because of the word Keys. We were also still 20 miles from key West. There was another place closer and they were 2 and 300 per night for an RV site. That's just way too much.

My point was at that level of money if it's not water front I'll just skip the whole thing and for sure not have mediocre for 1200.

RV Lot 518 in Venture Out at 701 Spanish Main Drive, Cudjoe Key, Florida 33042