We fully moved off the boat and into the travel trailer the first weekend in May. It has way less storage than the boat (how did we accumulate so much STUFF!?) so it was a very challenging first week as we tried to figure out how and where to store things and adjust to living in Fort Pierce.

Even though it was initially painful, the camper has become home and we’re even starting to enjoy it! It’s been too hot during the day – the AC doesn’t even keep up with the heat – but the evenings have been marvelous for hanging out outside!

We’ve been working on boat chores, camper chores, and trying to stay active. That pretty much describes our May. There are a lot of boat things that are “invisible” improvements, like fixing the gelcoat blemishes – a buyer won’t notice I fixed them, but they’d certainly notice if I didn’t! The same thing with repainting the interior, it’s a lot of work and it’s a big improvement!

We also offloaded a lot of stuff. We stocked up the boat like we were never going to see a grocery store again, fortunately now is a great time to donate nonperishables to food pantries so we happily let them distribute some of our overstock! We also brought a huge load of stuff to Goodwill. It’s weird to think that we’re downsizing…from living on a boat!

Speaking of no longer living on a boat, lightning storms are a lot more fun to watch when you’re not living underneath a giant lightning rod! And we’ve had some big ones roll through Fort Pierce, this one was far away enough that we weren’t getting rained on, and the lightning was so active I hauled the camera and tripod out to see what I could capture!

The marina / RV park where we’re living also hosts a drive in movie theater on the weekends, it’s too far away for us to really enjoy watching it from our campsite. We’ve also seen a few graduations take place at the drive-in, with varying degrees of social distancing observed. It’s been a surprisingly fun place to be stuck for a while!

A few boat showings sprinkled in through our month, but we didn’t have anyone who was serious about purchasing. And the people who did view it weren’t asking the right questions. Maybe we aren’t able to sufficiently market it ourselves, or maybe it’s because the COVID environment is keeping people at home more. Either way, we’ve decided a broker is the way to go, so we’re getting the ball rolling on that project.

Fort Pierce doesn’t seem to be too affected by COVID, or maybe I should say the people here don’t act like it’s a concern for them. Or maybe all the concerned people are staying home! Things started opening up again and we decided to go out to a restaurant for our anniversary mid month, we went early so it wouldn’t be crowded and we made sure to sit outside to get as much space as we could. In the end, we just weren’t comfortable with our decision. We enjoyed our meal and had a great view of a sunset-colored storm over the water, but we decided we aren’t ready to be doing things like that yet.

For Memorial Weekend, they actually closed the boat ramps and beaches near us (they had otherwise been open). I’m sure they would have been mobbed if they were still open! We didn’t do anything too special for the holiday weekend, although we did grab the camera and head to a spot in downtown Fort Pierce where – and I swear this is the proper terminology – an ostentation of peafowl live!

We showed up just as another couple left, and they had dumped the rest of their bird food in the parking lot so we were able to get close to the peahens. It was interesting to see the different colors and behaviors of the peahens and peacocks!

They are not caged, the only “fence” is to keep people out of the designated bird area. These peafowl frequently slow down traffic as they roam around the intersection!

After Memorial weekend, it was suddenly very late in the month and we still needed to get out of Florida! We got new tires for the camper so it’s ready to haul. Our license plate was initially shipped to the wrong address, that arrived in the last week of May so now we are officially able to haul the travel trailer somewhere. We had hoped to move the vehicles first, but between our chores and the good offshore weather window, we didn’t have time.

We had a nice solid weather window open up for an offshore hop to Charleston, so we should have spent a few days prepping for that. Instead, it rained for two days straight so we had to do all our camper and boat prep in two days! Stay tuned for the next post, which will likely be our last trip in this boat!