Laundry and Shopping

Friday, February 3, 2017

We have been on the road long enough to run out of clean clothes and the pantry was looking bare, so Friday was a day of errands. Ellen was talking to the campground hosts and asked about laundry. They knew of a new laundromat quite near the park entrance. Called Mr. Bubbles, it is right on Palm Drive not far from Robert Is Here. Also they mentioned an excellent Cuban bakery almost next door. What could be better?

After a necessary first stop for fuel (Speedy was very empty and took over 24 gallons), we found Mr. Bubbles. It is set back from the road but painted hard-to-miss yellow. It's a busy place with both a laundromat and commercial laundry service. It was all quite new with lots of front-loading washers in many sizes. The largest took a 60-pound load but we hadn't been out that long.

We filled two machines, threw in many quarters and headed off to the Palm Bakery. It was a Cuban bakery all right with the emphasis on Cuban. Only one employee, a young woman, spoke English, so until we managed to connect with her, we had no idea what anything was. After talking with her, we still didn't know what most of the items were, but they had lots of pastries. We ended up with a couple of pastries that looked sort of like muffins and two of something that looked like cups of custard. We also got two cups of excellent, although a bit sweet, Cuban coffee (espresso with sweetened milk).

The muffin-like pastry turned out to be sort of a small walnut pie, like pecan pie with a lighter filling and topped with walnuts, bit this also had a top crust. It was a quite tasty as an accompaniment to Cuban coffee. (An aside while talking pie: Moody's Diner on Route 1 in Maine has an excellent Walnut Pie.)

We haven't had the other pastry yet but we believe it is a quartro leches (four milks) cake. Previously Ellen has made an exceptional tre leches cake. It will be interesting to see how this compares.

By the time we finished our snack, the laundry was done. After a massive folding and storing exercise, it was off to the nearest Publix Market, about 2 miles further down the road. We've been to this Publix in the past and it is pretty well stocked except for the lack of a meat counter.

Once we'd finished and repacked Speedy's larder, it was well after lunch time. We looked online for a small place on our way back to the park and came up with the Taqueria Morelia which was well-reviewed as a good Mexican Restaurant. It was actually in the same little strip mall as the Valero station where we'd filled Speedy on the way into town.

Service was a bit slow but the food was really good. It was definitely a hole-in-the-wall place, but a very busy one. Ellen had the chicken burrito and I had the beef rib meat burrito. They were large, mostly meat, no rice and beans filler, and very tasty. The taqueria also had a salsa bar where there was a large choice of sauces. We avoided the habanero-based ones. We finished up with a helping of tres leches cake, which was the only disappointment. It was just a commercial single helping container that one could probably buy in the supermarket. The basic cake was good with good ingredients, but the topping was "whipped topping" which shone an almost blue white.

Finally, it was back to camp. The campground is full tonight as it was last night. It seems we lucked out by coming early in the week. We settled back into our quiet (though distant from the showers) camp site. Being still quite full from our late and large lunch, we passed on dinner and walked around looking for a few more birds. Among others we saw a Brown-headed Nuthatch working on a nest hole and then we called it a day.

Photos