We won the lottery!!

As we began creating our list of places to go and things to see in the eastern half of the country the Florida Keys popped on to our (my) radar.  How cool would it be to drive across the Overseas Highway, talk about the drive of a life time!  After extensive reading it became clear that staying in a state park in The Keys would be ideal.  Unfortunately most people think that!  Which means sites at those camp grounds fill quickly or as we soon found out, immediately.  The booking window for a site opens 11 months before hand at 8 a.m. Eastern time.  We decided we would shoot to be in The Keys for December 2017.  When December 2016 rolled around I began looking at sites even though they would be for November the following year.  I was shocked and a bit dismayed as I watched the sites fill every day.  Were people really booking every site this far in advance; yes, yes they were!  We decided that we should just start trying to book something and we would work our travel plans around it if we were able to get a site.  Christmas came and went with me trying to get a site every morning by getting up at 5:45 a.m. getting ready to try to click book at exactly the right second each morning.  A week and a half into this routine I was growing tired of being disappointed every morning but also came to accept that I was in this game for the long haul.  Certainly if I kept at it long enough we would land a spot.  One particularly disappointed morning I asked on a facebook group for fulltime R.V.ers if there was some secret to actually getting a site.  Not really was the unfortunate answer.  Use the fastest internet connection you can and keep trying.  Well on Jan. 3rd we won the FL State Park lottery and scored a site at Bahia Honda State Park.  As I watched the site switch from not available yet to reserved (had my heart drop a little again) Geary called me to the other room, "Come here, I don't want to mess it up."  Wait, what?!  Talk about cloud 9!  And so began the concrete we're really doing this part of our journey.  We'll be in Bahia Honda State Park December 3rd though December 17th, 2017 (2 week booking limit).  Having one concrete piece in place we began working around those dates trying to figure out where we are staying on our way down to The Keys and on the way back up from The Keys.  Dry Tortugas National Park is still on the conversation table.  An expensive excursion no doubt but... if we're down there shouldn't we go all in?!  Time (and budgets) will tell.  Excited and scared as we inch closer to making this dream a reality.