New Toys, Another Good-bye, One Week Left

As we prepare to hit the road, we just had to get a few new items from Amazon... important things like a water filter system, some Refrigerator Bars so that items don’t go pouring out when we open the fridge door after travel, some spices, some cleaning wipes, a cell booster for our Verizon Air Card, and oh ya, a new camera (now we are talking toys!!!!)  The camera is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ60K, 16.1 MP Digital Camera with 24x Optical Zoom.  In one word.... ILOVEIT!  (“I love it” for those of you who have to see it in real English and not my RVonics talk.)  Below is a picture of the box before I opened it taken from the "old" camera.

Yep, I have been thinking of a camera for a few years now.  Once I was thinking of a Nikon SLR, like the D5000 series.  Well, about a month ago I looked into cameras again, and in looking at a Nikon CoolPix, I saw a few reviews from people who had bought the Nikon but did not like it, although there were a huge number of good reviews.  But within some of the not so good reviews were comments such as, “I wish I would have bought a Panasonic...”, and one said that they had a friend with the FZ60 and wished they would have bought it instead of the Nikon.  While looking over the Panasonic, they too had a few bad reviews, but I NEVER saw a review which said, “I wish I would have bought a Nikon...”  So I looked over this FZ60 real good, and looked over a few Nikons and a few other Panasonics and decided that I liked the Panasonic better.  Next objective....convince Marcia that we needed to shell out another $325 for a new camera.  Well, the best way to do that is to wait until the camera is on sale for only $289, and BINGO, we have a new camera.

Now I have only had time to play with it for about an hour or two (or three or four...), and all I can say is, WOW!  This is some camera.  With our older Kodak point and shoot I had to touch up just about every picture in PhotoShop...with this camera, that won’t be as important to do outside of cropping a picture due to my non-photo perfection eye that some photographers naturally have.  Here are a few pictures which I took just to see the capabilities of the camera....

 The above and below pictures were taken from our back door, no touch-up or cropping.

 Below is the little girl who just loves to be the center of attention.  Again, no touch-up or cropping.

 

Above is a flower on a tree/bush on the other side of our back fence.  Picture was taken from 30' away, and all I did was crop the pictures.  Below is one of the infamous evil squirrels up in a tree above our back fence, taken from about 40' away, and again, all I did was crop the picture.  The leaves are in focus more than the squirrel, but it does show the capabilities of this camera.

Well, enough for toys....something tells me that I will be talking about the “ILOVEIT” toy in future posts.  Saturday the four of us (Dave, Marcia, Bubba and Skruffy) headed out to the Orlando area to have a last visit with Dean and Carol before we take off for what looks like the next 18 months.  It was a nice visit, and here are a few pictures....wait?  What??  You have to be joking me....you bought that new camera and didn’t even bring it on our first trip out of town!!!!  Yes Skruffy, that is correct....did not want picture taking to take away from our nice 9 hour visit with family, and besides, you will be in a bunch of pictures over the next year and a half, so go bark at someone else you picture hog!  And Bubba, stop snickering at your sister!  (I can see that the next 18 months are going to fun with all this going on....)

Anyway, we did have a great visit with Dean and Carol, and enjoy a real nice late lunch or early dinner at a place called “Swamp House Riverfront Grill”.  The restaurant looks out on the St. John’s River right at the Highbanks Marina & Camp Resort (marina and RV park).  It is air conditioned, but open air view of the river.  Even though it was a normal spring humid day in Florida, it was comfortable even with the open air window view.  And the food was real good for place like this, with live music coming from the bar area below...not loud, good singer, very appropriate music for the setting.

It was hard to say goodbye, but we know that most of our family is just a phone call away, and we also know that our closest family are faithful followers of our blog.  There are many reasons we write the blog....and at the top of the list is for our family and friends so that we can share our travels with them, and with anyone else who dares to follow along.

Which leads me to the final thought....we leave a week from today, we have a lot to do, but plenty of time to do it all in.  Everything is still going well with the sale of the house, and we will be very relieved when it does finalize.  We have already signed some of the papers at the Title Company, and have given Marcia’s brother Mike the power to sign other documents in our absence.  So we are good to go...and go is only 7 days away.  We look forward to our travels...look forward to seeing family along the way....and look forward to seeing family when we return, and throughout it will be scattered with visits with friends, old and new.  Oh, I almost forgot...and many pictures of Skruffy, and few pictures of Bubba.  (Ok girl, you can start wagging your tail again...)