Heading Home

On Tuesday morning, we left the Keys and headed north.  We drove about 450 miles and ended up at Alachua, FL, just north of Gainesville.  Very nice park, cable and fast, free WI-FI.  They also had quite the collection of animals.  They had 4 or 5 cows, at least a dozen goats and probably close to 50 African Parrots.  Here are a couple of the parrots.

I don't know if they did bird rescues, or bred them or just liked to have a lot of them, but they sure did have plenty of them.  The dogs were very interested in the parrots.  I took them for a walk over to these cages just as someone was starting to feed them.  The parrots were quite noisy and stayed that way until dark when you didn't hear them at all.

We left Alachua this morning and continued north to Calhoun, GA driving about 385 miles. We are staying at a very nice KOA.  Here's our site.

This KOA has it all.  Pool, cable TV, free WI-FI, nice patio sites (like ours), bicycle rentals, firewood and on and on.  They gave us some doggie treats when we checked in, guided us to our site and then came back about 20 minutes later to check to be sure everything was okay and brought us some WARM chocolate chip cookies!

We also ordered a pizza and chicken wings from the store here.  Delivery to your site!  It was nice not to cook tonight.

This place also is a bit of an animal menagerie.  They have a bunch of very small goats up front, lots of bunnies running around and they also have five peacocks that roam the property.  This white one just walked right up to our site and hung out for awhile.

I was sitting outside with the dogs when it came up and I had to take them back in.  The bird didn't seem to mind, but the dogs were driving me nuts barking at it and I wanted to enjoy watching it.  About 45 minutes later it came back with two other peacocks.

He soon began the "fan dance".

I didn't realize this until I looked it up, but males are peacocks and females are peahens.  It's the males that have this long, beautiful train and it's a mating ritual when they show it.

If you listen carefully in this video, you can hear the sound his train makes as he rustles it.  (Of course, you can also hear Jackie whining towards the end of the video, too.  She wanted to come outside and see it so bad.)

Youtube video of White Peacock

Sort of a weird coincidence that two nights in a row, we get to see some exotic birds, but I loved it.  Who knows what we might see tomorrow!

In the morning, we will head north to Walton, KY.  That will be about 370 miles, leaving us about 260 miles on Friday.  I really have enjoyed taking a bit longer to get home.  It's nice to get off the road around 4:00, relax a bit, sit outside and then have dinner.  Even though we gave up a day in the Keys to do it this way, it is definitely better.  We're not as burned out at the end of the day.

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