Remembering the Area – Visiting Family

(Melbourne, FL) – Our site is facing the same direction as our "winter home" site in Wauchula, so we get a strong afternoon sun in our big rear windows.  So on a warm day we have to start closing shades to help the air conditioner.  Today was a very pretty and warm day.  We love it here in Melbourne area, it’s like being back home.  We were stationed at nearby Patrick AFB for four years back in the 70's.  And Jim grew up south of here near Ft. Lauderdale, and we dated and got married in the W. Palm Beach area.


We didn’t hang around long this morning. We drove over the causeway to Patrick AFB to see if we would remember anything, and guess what... we didn't.  :)  It’s grown up so much and very little was familiar to either of us.  The causeway is beautiful.  It goes over the Banana River (Intracoastal Waterway) to the beaches.  (Click on the pictures to make larger)


Patrick AFB is on the beach side and is separated by the ocean on the east and the Banana River on the west.  We lived in base housing just south of the base, and at night we could hear the ocean from our house.  We watched rockets launch at Cape Canaveral from our front yard.   It was a wonderful four years, and to this day Jim says it was the best base we were stationed at. 

While on base we checked out the famcamp.  Here are a couple of photos for those military RV’ers who may be in this area someday. 

The office as you’re coming into the famcamp.

The Banana River from the famcamp entrance.

The bath house.

One of the rows of RV's.

We spent the afternoon with Jim's cousin Andy and his wife Dee.  He was busy cooking a deer ham and pork ham in a smoker to add to tomorrow's Thanksgiving turkey.


This is Dee and her granddaughter Abbey.

Jim and Andy remembering good times.
 
This is a wasp nest that Andy found in the forest behind the house.  He has quite a tale about getting rid of the wasps.  This is the bottom where they go into it.

This is the nest hanging by the door. It’s amazing, it feels like thin paper.

Andy and Dee have a small pond in their back yard with lots of fish and a couple of alligators.  It's hard to see the gator in this photo, so I circled it.

I don’t think there’s any way a cat or dog would live long, so they don’t have either.:)

We were surprised to find out Andy has an RV...

...but as you can see it's not in very good shape.

He's going to make a hunting shelter out of it, then sell it.  Looks like too much work to me.

I’ll have a lot more pictures tomorrow. We’re enjoying all the activity around here. It’s going to be a really neat couple days...in paradise.