This travel update is for our two weeks in St. Augustine, Florida. It covers June 13 – 28.

June 13, 2023 – Tuesday: Moving Across The State

We were up early this morning in our mobile home on Longboat Key and I walked over to the marina to see one final sunrise which was quite nice.

We were on the road by 10AM. I fit our new Dakine bags into the car. They’re the large black ones on either side.

I was a little sad to leave Twin Shores Mobile Home Park, but was looking forward to another adventure.

Our route took us north and east to the other side of Florida.

We made a quick stop in Lakeland at the public library there because Patti had ordered a library card that she wanted to pick up. We read books on our phones and most public libraries these days have online repositories for books. I have library cards for Cincinnati and Sarasota and I download all kinds of books to read on my phone. Right now we’ve each downloaded tour guide books for Norway. For me, the advantages of online public libraries are that they’re free, and the books don’t weigh anything. Drawbacks are that sometimes a book you want isn’t available and you either get on the waiting list or suggest that the library acquire it.

Our Two-Week House Sitting Gig:

This is our first official house sit. The deal with house sitting is that we don’t pay anything to stay here and the owners don’t pay us anything to take care of their place, pets, and plants while they’re gone. We’re in a 3-bedroom 3-bath house in a suburb of St. Augustine. It’s a nice house, Patti said Zillow estimates its sale price would be around $800,000 this year. You can see our car parked on the right in this picture, in front of the detached garage.

The backyard is pretty big and has a pergola.

There’s a big lanai in two parts, this part is under the birdcage so when it rains it gets wet.

This part of the lanai is under a roof and is where the cats usually hang out.

There’s a formal sitting room that we don’t use.

And a formal dining room that we don’t use.

The kitchen is almost as big as some Airbnbs that we’ve stayed in.

The den has a big TV.

We usually eat in the breakfast nook.

It’s nice to have a laundry room like this.

We’re using the second guest bedroom to lay out our bags.

This is the second guest bathroom.

Our bedroom is pretty roomy and has an ensuite bathroom.

Michael and Cheryl have their master bedroom/bathroom suite on the other side of the house. So, as you may have noticed, we’re living above our normal socioeconomic level here. It’s a lovely place.

And, meet the pets. Here’s Jaxx, a 10-year-old Jack Russell Terrier.

Spot is a 16-year-old mixed breed cat.

Wilson is a 3-year-old Maine Coon.

Teddy is a 1-year-old Russian Blue.

Our duties include feeding the animals twice a day and keeping their water bowls full and clean. Jaxx gets a pill twice a day and Spot gets four pills once a day. I service the litter boxes once a day and Patti waters some plants.

The owners, Michael and Cheryl are retired and went on vacation to the British Isles for two weeks. We drove them to the airport up in Jacksonville when they left and picked them up when they returned.

The cats often sit in their “cat tree” on the lanai. One day I decided to pose with them.

We took Jaxx out for a walk almost every day.

Sometimes he wanted to ride in the stroller.

One morning all three cats were up on the kitchen island for breakfast and I wasn’t sure exactly what to do with them all. You can never predict cats.

The Exciting Lightning Strike:

You’ll have to forgive me for going into detail here, I was an electrical engineer for 26 years and this was really cool.

On Monday, our fifth day here, there was a ferocious thunderstorm and one lightning strike was very close to the house. The lights flickered and the electronics rebooted. Unfortunately, the Wifi router and the three TVs lost their signal and would not function. So, over the next four days I was doing texts and video calls with Cheryl, who was in London, then Stratford On Avon, then Liverpool, to help troubleshoot the problem and fix as much as possible. She liaised with Xfinity to report the problems and schedule appointments. An Xfinity guy came Tuesday and used his signal strength meter to troubleshoot the issues. He ran a temporary cable from the Xfinity hub at the curb to our junction box and also replaced the splitter in the box. Here’s the junction box.

Here’s the Tap at the Hub out near the curb.

The orange temporary cable ran across the lawn and over the driveway.

After that the TV in our bedroom worked and the Wifi worked but the guy said the signal was noisy and scheduled some more work to be done. Thursday a couple of guys came and located the problem in the trunk cable out at the tap, they dug down about 4 feet, cut out the bad section of cable, and spliced in a new one. Here’s their hole.

The bad section of cable had two cuts in it, probably made accidentally when the irrigation system people were installing their PVC piping five years ago. Here’s the bad cable.

After they left another guy came and buried a new cable from the Tap to the Junction Box. It was interesting to watch him work, he just made a small cut in the lawn with his tool, spread it apart a bit, and worked the new cable into the trench about four inches deep. Then he stepped over and across the trench along its length to close it, which looked a little like a trench dance.

Friday some replacement equipment came. The cable box in the living room had been damaged by the lightning strike so I replaced it so we could watch the big TV again.

I had a fun time with all this. It was a lot less stressful to be fixing someone else’s problems than to be dealing with them at my own house.

So, my conclusion is that the underground trunk cable had been damaged years ago by the plumbers and had been slowly corroding. The lightning strike did the final damage to the cable and also fried a couple of electronics components in the house.

We Did A Few Things While We Were Here:

But not too much. We spent a lot of time just hanging out with the animals and planning what we want to do in Norway.

We went out to St. Augustine Beach one day, which was nice. It’s always good to smell the salt water and feel the sea breeze.

Michael and Cheryl gave us a $100 gift card to Publix grocery store as a thank you for driving them to and from the airport. We decided to use it to buy some high-cost beef and have a luxurious meal of Filet Mignon, mashed potatoes, corn, and broccoli in cheese sauce. Here’s Patti in the kitchen with the food.

We take Jaxx for a daily walk and there are lots of deer around. Here are four young ones with an adult female. They hang out in people’s yards, as well as the adjacent woods.

We walked around historic downtown St. Augustine one day, here we are with the old gates of the city.

I like nautical things, this old anchor was cool.

And of course canon are always fun.

The Bridge of Lions has lion sculptures, here’s Patti with one of them.

One day we had lunch at the food truck area at a local marina.

We decided to get Arepas, which, if you haven’t tried them, are pretty good.

“Arepa is a type of food made of ground maize dough stuffed with a filling, eaten in the northern region of South America since pre-Columbian times, and notable primarily in the cuisine of Colombia and Venezuela, but also present in the cuisines of Bolivia, Ecuador and Panama.”

How Was Our First House Sitting Experience?:

We enjoyed it. We like pets and the house was beautiful. We also saved money for these two weeks which we will likely spend during our upcoming 3 months in Norway which is said to be an expensive country.

For the future we will probably be wanting to splice house sits into our schedule as appropriate, to save money and just for something different. Also, we like animals.

It does feel a little odd to insert ourselves into someone else’s life. We showed up the day before Michael and Cheryl left and they trained us in how to perform their daily routines. So, we basically pretended to be Michael and Cheryl for two weeks. The pets didn’t seem to notice much difference as long as they got fed on time.

Future Plans:

• June 29 – July 5: we’ve got an Airbnb reserved in Ellijay, in the north Georgia mountains. We’re planning on doing some hiking in the mountains there.
• July 5 – 11: We’ve got our second House Sit scheduled in Columbia, South Carolina. We’ll be taking care of two dogs while their owners go on vacation.
• July 11 – 12: We’ll be staying with friends of ours at their house in Bonneau, South Carolina
• July 13 – 14: we’re stopping by Sarasota to put our domestic travel gear back in the storage unit and get our international travel gear. We’ll be spending two nights in a Quality Inn Motel.
• July 15 – 16: we’re driving over to my brother’s place in Mulberry, Florida to see him and his wife and drop off my car which they will keep for me while we’re out of the country. We’ll pick up a rental car at the Avis place in Lakeland.
• July 17: we’re driving to FLL (Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport) and taking a Norse Atlantic flight to Oslo, Norway. Ticket cost is $1,022 for both of us one way.
• July 18 – 26: We’ve got Airbnb reservations at an Airbnb in Oslo
• July 27: we’re flying Norwegian Airlines from Oslo to Longyearbyen.
• July 27 – August 2: we’ve got an Airbnb reservation for a place in Longyearbyen.
• August 2: we have flight reservations on SAS to go from Longyearbyen to Tromsø.
• We’re thinking we’ll stay for a few days in Tromsø then head south down the coast of Norway. We’ll make reservations as we go.
• October 17 – December 3: no plans yet.
• December 3 – 9: I’ll be participating in research in Durham, North Carolina at the Med-El facilities there. Med-El is the company that made my cochlear implant and they’re going to put us up in a hotel and I’ll spend 9AM to 4PM for 5 days that week being a lab rat. They say they will test various new programming options for my cochlear implant with the goal of improving their systems. It should be fun, I’m looking forward to it.
• December 9: we’ll drive to Bradenton, Florida
• December 9 – 31: we’ve reserved a cabin at Horseshoe Cove RV Park in Bradenton, Florida, where we stayed last year around this time. We’re looking forward to singing in the Christmas Choir again.

2024

• January through April: we plan to travel through Belize, Costa Rica, and Panama. We don’t have any reservations yet.
• May and June: we’ve reserved a cabin at Horseshoe Cove RV Park in Bradenton, Florida again and we’ll spend these two months getting our yearly medical stuff done and visiting with family and friends. May and June are “off-season” here, and the rate is $56 per night for these 61 days, which is pretty good for a place like this in this location. In season, January through March, the price doubles.