New Orleans/FL Trip (Day 36) - Ft. Lauderdale - Tampa

The ship docked at Port Everglades (Ft. Lauderdale) about 7:00 am and we were in the 2nd group to depart. We had put our luggage in the hall the night before with tags indicating what departure group we were in. Staff picked it up that evening, so when we left in the morning, we only had hand-held baggage to carry-off the ship. We used a small roll away suitcase and backpacks. We quickly picked up our luggage on the dock and cleared customs without difficulty. The luggage was sorted by departure group and lots of porters were available, making it easy to find and get to the taxi cab stand. We took a cab back to the hotel, and thankfully, found the RV and VW just as we left them.





After putting cruise clothes away and sorting clothes we needed for the next phase of the trip, we left for Tampa about 11:00 am. We headed west through the everglades, then north through Ft. Meyers along the west coast of Florida to the Tampa Bay area, arriving about 4:00 PM.

We crossed a septacular bridge on the way north on I-275: The Sunshine Skyway Bridge, spanning Tampa Bay from Bradenton, FL to St. Petersburg, FL. The bridge is beautiful and is considered by many as one of the top ten bridges in the world. It is 5.5 miles long and 191 ft above the bay at its highest point. It is a cable-stayed concrete bridge modeled after a bridge in France. It was completed in 1987 and replaced a steel cantilever bridge with two spans - the first completed in 1954, and the second in 1971. Twelve hundred feet of the old southbound span toppled into the bay in 1980 after it was rammed by a freighter in a heavy rainstorm. Thirty-five people were killed in the disaster including those on a Greyhound bus and six cars that drove off the broken span in the rain. One person survived when his pick-up truck landed on the freighter.




We stayed at the Bay Bayou RV Resort on the north side of Tampa Bay. Actually, the name of the town where the RV park is located is Oldsmar, FL. The park is really nice, a Good Sam Top 100 park, and has a lot of “snowbirds” there for the winter, mostly from places like Canada, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, etc. Pat was fighting a sinus problem, with a lot of congestion, so after an early dinner, we went to bed.