St. Patty's Day - Attention in the Park - Fla DMV- GPS

Happy St. Patty's Day! We use to go out and have green beer on March 17, but haven't done that in a few years. I hope everyone has a great time!

As part of the process of becoming Floridians, we have to register our truck, car, and RV. The state DMV requires that all of our VIN numbers be verified. So Jim called the sheriff's department as soon as we got up to have someone come out to do this. A deputy was here in minutes after calling. (Must have been a slow crime morning.) It attracted a lot of attention from the neighbors around us. They came over to talk to Jim wondering if everything was OK. Nothing like making a good impression. I guess they check to see if we're driving stolen vehicles. That puzzles me... why would we even call if they were stolen?

Next on the agenda today was waiting for the mail to arrive at the park office then go to the DMV. It didn't get here, but we went anyway to at least register the vehicles. Here's what's needed just in case you're thinking of becoming Fla residents and your going fulltime.

Under the new post-911 rules, we have to have proof of our Florida address. We use a mail forwarding service called MYRVMAIL which has been very good so far. You look online to see what's in your mailbox and you can have it scanned or sent to any address. It's a street address with a number, which qualifies as a "residence" address.

We needed to bring our current NC license and registration. We don't yet have the title for our RV, so the DMV has to contact our lien holder and have them send the title before we can get a tag. That could take more time than we have here in Ocala, so we're going to wait until we get to Jacksonville next week. We're also hoping they can fax the title, which will save time.

To get our driver licenses, we need to have proof of our identity, which can only be a birth certificate or passport. Thank goodness we got passports a couple of years ago! We also have to have proof of our address. We got voters cards right away; in fact we had that done before we left NC. Then anything that is a bill, verizon, insurance, etc. There's a list of acceptable documents on the information sheet we got online.

To sum up, so far we have the truck and car registered with new tags, and we'll wait until we get to Jacksonville to complete the process for the RV. We'll get our driver licenses as soon as our voter cards arrive in the mail here at the park. We were surprised how fast it was. There was NO line at all and the lady was very friendly. Amazing for a DMV office.

We went to Best Buy to get a new GPS. We got a Garmin Nuvi 1390T. Our old unit just won't find the satellites anymore, and when it does it drops the connection at random times. So we bought a new model with more bells and whistles. It has a nice feature called "Lane Assist", which shows you visually what lane you should be in. It even shows the big green overhead signs on the screen, which is really cool. I think I'll have it in my car and just radio to Jim when to turn or get into another lane. If that doesn't work we'll switch it to his truck. We do a lot of traveling in my car and it's just good to have it there. We'll see how it works out.

It was supposed to rain all day but it didn't. It was cloudy but the temp got to 64.

Thanks to the new readers. I try to cover what we're doing as newbies in the fulltime lifestyle.