Welcome Aboard!

I mentioned our Cannonball Run across state lines to get the final loan documents notarized.  We had to go to Georgia because if we had it completed in Florida apparently it would have cost us $2500.00, so we decided that the four hour drive each way was worth it.  Around the same time, Florida opened up COVID vaccination to anyone 50+, and I was able to score a couple of appointments at a CVS in Jacksonville.  Add an Ikea along the way that had some specific storage stuff that was perfect for the boat and a sporting goods store in Daytona that had a kayak Dave was interested in, and we had a full day mapped out.  This after a week of just sitting around waiting.  So early on the last day of March, we loaded Roxy in the car for what was going to one of our final road trips and headed north on I-95. 

First stop was for our immunizations.  The afternoon before, I had found a CVS in Jacksonville with slots available.  We had been advised that since Florida sees so many snowbirds from out of state, they were accepting a copy of your rental agreement or in our case the RV park receipt showing that we were residing in state.  We had them with us, but no one ever asked to see it.  They checked off my name and pointed me toward the Minute Clinic where they were administering the shots.  While waiting in line, I noticed a group of five people in business suits hanging around, observing, which seemed a little out of place in a drugstore.  After a completely painless shot,  I’m sitting in the socially distanced post-vaccine waiting area for the required 15 min wait when the Nurse Practitioner seeing regular Minute Clinic patients sticks her head out the door of the exam room and tells the nurse that the paramedics are coming and to make room for them.  He starts rearranging the post-vaccine waiters, looking a little flustered.  

“Great.  Our vice-president is here today and this happens,” he confesses as he sits back down at the desk near me. 

“Well this is your chance to show them how well the clinic does its job.”

“It’s my first day.”

“That I would suggest you leave out.”

A few minutes later, three paramedics arrive and cram into the Minute Clinic patient room so they can close the door, followed shortly by four big firemen pushing an ambulance gurney who stand in the waiting area looking uncomfortable at everyone staring at them.  I noticed a middle-aged woman walk up to the vaccination station whose eyes went wide as she saw them with all their equipment.  She glanced over at me, since I was the closest person sitting there.  “It’s not for anyone that had the vaccine,” I told her.  She looked relieved and no longer like she was about to turn tail and run.  The ‘patient’ walked out on her own power with the paramedics after about five minutes, looks at the gurney, says ‘are we really going to do this?’ and looked her share of uncomfortable as they wheeled her down the Antacid and Allergy Care aisle in route to the door as the guys in suits stared .  That CVS certainly was a hoppin’ place that day.

Once done there we headed just across the border to a UPS store in St. Mary’s, GA.  There we were able to print the multi-page document (we don’t have a printer in the camper, something we were discovering could be a problem even in this day of everything supposedly being electronic), sign in multiple places and get it notarized, and send it out overnight delivery all in about 20 min.  We have become big fans of the utility of UPS Stores – we have used them A LOT lately.  From there, we dashed back across the St. Mary’s River into Florida to Ikea.  I wanted one specific thing, but those places are laid out so strangely that you can’t just walk to the department and I had to do the mouse-in-a-maze routine of following all the arrows on the floor for the longest distance between two points, only to realize I had walked half a mile to get 50 yards from where I entered the store.  Meanwhile, Dave was waiting in the car with Roxy wondering why it was taking so long because the sporting goods store in Daytona closed in less than two hours and we were an hour and 40 minutes away.  I didn’t even have the door closed and he was putting it in gear and backing out.  We raced down to Daytona (see what I did there?) to this small local skateboard place that also happened to be about the only place between Miami and Virginia who had this Hobie kayak in stock that Dave wanted, I suspect because nobody even knew they carried kayaks.  And they had ONE.  We arrived 20 min before they closed, Dave walks up and tells them he wants the kayak, runs around with the sales guy grabbing accessories off the racks, all the employees follow us out, lock the door, and Dave and I are left in an empty parking lot trying to secure an 11’ boat into a 5’ truck bed.  Roxy’s domain in the backseat was being encroached upon by paddles and pedal drives as we went in search of food before the final two hour drive back to the trailer, arriving back at the trailer 13 hours after we had left that morning.  Our final reckoning for the day?  Two states and another 500 miles on the road, two COVID shots, closing paperwork for the boat done and sent, saved $2500 on some weird Florida fee, then spent over $4000 on a fully accessorized kayak.