Monday 14th July 2014 The Everglades National Park was the planned destination for the next two days and Victor once again volunteered to drive. All we took with us was a change of clothes and our bathers, plus cameras, esky, laptop, shoes etc, and the Toyota Highlander (Kluger) was full. The 120 kms flew by we reaching the town of Naples where we booked into the La Quinta hotel. They wouldn't honour the coupons we had for a reduced rate, saying they were out of date but would discount it to within 90 cents using Rags' RAC card. Rather pedantic but we were glad we remembered to take our card with us. Reciprocal benefits with the AA exist and we knew this from previous visits. Lovely clean, large rooms. Off we went further south to the ... read more

Tuesday 8th July 2014 Today our destination was to a hotel near Titusville which is close to the Kennedy Space Centre which we intend to visit tomorrow. We left the motel at 0830hrs just grabbing a coffee and a little bit to eat as we are stopping at Cracker Barrels, just down the road, as Victor and Helen enjoy the breakfasts there. This was true to form, with huge helpings, we being smart this time and sharing a plate of fried egg, bacon, ham & sausage, plus fried spuds, toast, grits and stewed apples plus unlimited coffee, all for $15 including a good tip. Enough protein to keep us going until this evening. But I think Judy enjoyed the attached shop which had all sorts of knick knacks as much as, if not more than, the ... read more

Thursday 3rd July 2014 The final pack before we left was a little hectic, where did all the extra stuff come from when we haven't done any shopping? We also now have an Esky (cooler box) thanks to Ili and Allan, but carrying it to the train and car hire place caused Rags a few headaches. Thanks to a bunch of occy straps we bought we managed to attach it to the top of one of the cases and we had no problems with it. After arriving at the airport by train we had to catch one of their inter-terminal trains to get to the car hire section. It is then that you realise how large the airport is as we traveled several kilometres by train to the rental car stop. Here we were given the ... read more

Wednesday 4th June 2014 We were down at the port by 0930 and sat around for a while in the nearby park before going down to the pier where the ferry was to come in. It seemed that it would be late as it hadn't arrived when scheduled. We stood on the pier and started a conversation with tow American ladies - mother and daughter who were traveling together. The time soon went and just in time, the ferry pulled up, took all of about 20 passengers on board and left exactly on 1030 as scheduled. The 90 min trip up the Danube River, against a strong current, went smoothly, the big diesel engines driving the water jets had the boat travelling at about 25 knots. There wasn't much scenery, mainly forest which grew to the ... read more

Friday 30th May 2014 What a difference a good night's sleep makes. We both awoke at an early hour (0530) to the sound of roosters crowing, pigeons cooing and cuckoos cukooing. By just after 0700 we were down in the dining area for breakfast, the staff just finishing setting it up. Not only did they have muesli and yoghurt, they actually had a fairly decent coffee too. Apart from the ubiquitous cheese and meat they also had a huge bowl of cherries. We have seen several large cherry trees in the vicinity including one in the hotel grounds that was simply loaded with cherries. We took our time over breakfast and getting ready to go out but by about 1000 we went out to have a look at the huge Baroque chateau here. We found a ... read more