Lake Placid, West Palm

From Jose

We left Patty's with a sad heart. She was having difficulty breathing and she decided to go into the hospital to get her meds adjusted. We decided to continue the trip to give her freedom to do what she needs to do. We'll check with her again on the way back north.

Not far from Sebring we stopped in Lake Placid, FL to see the house where my parents lived from 1975 to 1995.  When my parents lived there it was a cute little house and I had many good memories of it. The owners after my parents enclosed the carport and the back porch in a very tacky way. The house has been empty for three or four years and is up for sale.  When I went there there were two guys working on restoring water to the house because the water pump had been stolen and someone is interested in buying it. I think I'll just keep the memories, thank you very much.

We headed south, around the south side of  Lake Okeechobee to the West Palm Beach area and checked in at a cool campground with lakefront sites. Diane had been complaining of abdominal pain for a couple of days and when we got to our campsite it got bad enough that she (finally) agreed to go to a walk-in clinic. They did some tests which showed that it could be serious and recommended she go to the ER.

Not to appear that it's all about me, Diane was in excruciating pain, but I'll tell you my side of the story. You have to picture this. By now it was dark (we both hate driving at night), it was raining buckets, we checked in to the ER and Diane was assigned a room. I reached for my wallet to show ID to be allowed in with her and my wallet was not in my pocket. I went back to the RV (still torrential rain) searched all over, no wallet. My guess is that when I came in the RV after paying for the campground I did not put it back in my pocket and it fell off at our site. The angel behind the front desk allowed me in anyway.  By now Diane was off to some more tests and I was contemplating driving back to the campsite without my wallet, at night, during a bad storm to search for my drenched wallet. What else could go wrong?  Diane came back from the tests, still with a lot of pain, and we waited for the results. About this time the angel behind the front desk walked in with my wallet! It fell off my pocket in the ER waiting area. Somehow it got to her, she opened it and saw it belonged to me, tracked me down to Diane's room. I gave her a big hug.

The doctor came in and told Diane the diagnosis, prescribed some meds and sent us on our way. Next task was finding a 24-hour Walgreens. Still raining very hard, flooded streets, the GPS loosing signal because of the heavy rain.

We got back to our campsite after midnight and did not hook up or even back in. Just shut the engine off, warmed up some leftovers and went to sleep, glad that day was over.

Unfortunately the next day was not much better. Diane's abdominal pain continued, even with the high-powered meds she was taking. Again, I'll let her go into the details, but her suffering was to continue for some time... The heat and humidity is very uncomfortable, we have the air conditioning on all the time. It is harder to find a Campground with vacancy, they are all booked with snowbirds.  Aaaahhh!

We have traveled South some more, now near Miami and if I can help it this will be as close as I'm going to get.

Stay tuned