March 8 - 11 - Fri - Mon.

Fri - We arrived at our next site, Ortuna campground in LaBelle, Fł. It is a super nice campground, extremely well maintained. It is a Core of Enginers park, and their parks are usually kept up very well and are almost always by water. Our site is concrete, which is great for keeping the RV level & it is right next to the waterway by the locks. So we see a lot of pleasure boats going by. It is a good thing we had reservations, because the park is filled. We spent Sat & Sun getting familiar with the area since we will be here 2weeks. We found a church and went to Sat evening mass. The one draw-back to this park is that it is out in the "boonies" the nearest town to LaBelle (which is very small) is Clewston which is also very small.

Mon. - It was a very nice morning, clear blue sky, about low 70's we decided to check out some beaches. We drove to Ft Myers about 1hr away. Well it is spring break &the traffic was terrible! We knew we would never get a close parking spot and there were people EVERWHERE!! In the area near the beach. That is not for us, Ft Myers for all it's hype did not impress us. So we went a little farther south to Sanibel Island which we also heard a lot about. Parking also is terrible, but there were areas along the beach road where you can park right by the water, which we did. We put down our chairs and had the lunch we packed, but it was more of a fishing beach. Sooooooo, we got back in the car and headed to Bonita Beach but we were told it was more of a shell beach than sand beach but were told "Lover's Key state park" had a sand beach. Soooooo off we went again! From the parking lot they had a free tram which took you to the beach which otherwise was about a half mile walk. Needless to say we took the tram, but it was already about 3:30 and the last tram from the beach was 4:30, so we had about 45min to spend on the beach (because we were not about to walk back to the parking lot) it was a nice sand/shell beach. I sat and enjoyed watching the waves &Richard did some metal detecting. He found 42 cents! It was an interesting day!