Wednesday Night Riders: REPORT FROM FLORIDA

Sunday, January 12, 2020

REPORT FROM FLORIDA

YES, we did make it to Panama City Beach on New Year's Eve. More on that in a minute, but first here's a link sent to the blog from a friend down south. He says if you are going to have a good Christmas parade, you got to be down south further than Missouri. Click on the link below and you'll see what he was talking about.

https://www.facebook.com/rudy.tanielian/videos/3201473466535300/?t=5

OUR JOURNEY SOUTH
We departed Waukon on Dec.30th with some freezing rain in the area. We took it real slow until we got south of Cedar Rapids when it was just raining. As soon as we got out of Iowa, the sun came out and we traveled through St. Louis and spent the night in Jackkson, TN, the home of Casey Jones. We continued on the next day through Montgomery and Birmingham and down to PCB. The trike on the trailer took some real crap from the highways in Iowa, so we stopped and gave her a good wash down in Defuniak Springs.

RIDING AROUND THE AREA
So far we have put about 550 miles on the trike, doing some of our familiar rides from the years before. The weather here has been above normal with highs in the mid 70's, so the trike got all the old gas rolled out of her pretty quickly. I usually don't like to mention the weather here to you folks back in Iowa, but from what we can gather, the weather back there hasn't been too bad. One thing we did notice is that this area has come along ways from the hurricane damage from what we saw last year. The biggest problem seems to be able to get good reliable contractors to do the repair work. They are still working on our condo building itself, and are doing some unit renovations from the storm damage. Our unit survived well, but a new patio door had to be installed.

OUR FLORIDA FRIENDS
We were able to hook up with the Panama City GWRRA chapter. In fact, they had a welcoming for us at Beef O'Brady's followed by a visit to DQ for desert. Since then we have been with them for another meal at the Lazy Dog Bar & Grill (strange name--great food). Yes, they like to eat down here too! We have a trip planned to a chapter meeting down in Dothan, AL on Tuesday, and the chapter meeting here is next week. Julie and I have also got in a couple of rounds of golf--one with the DeBuhr's and one by ourselves.

Here's some photos from our condo unit.