Our Travel Blog

Not too bad this morning, mid-teens when we woke up and a little bit of blue sky. Unfortunately the forecast was not very good…rain.

After breakfast I headed off to get some quadcopter flying in. I’ve had better days, for some reason today the ‘copter seemed to control me, not the other way round. I did learn a couple of things though, when the blades hit the ground all four engines stop immediately. That is a good thing as, on most machines, the engines will keep going causing the machine to thrash around doing itself more damage and / or burn out the engines. In today’s case, no damage was done. The other thing I learnt was after shutting down from a episode like that, the machine will send out an audio tone at intervals, this would let you track it if it was lost in trees or scrub land.

Just after I got back the rain started and stayed for the rest of the day.

Lyn did the laundry this afternoon, and I did battle trying to teach our “smart” remote control how to control the radio without messing up the settings for other components. The remote won, I lost

Cloudy and a little cooler this morning, but the clouds quickly gave way to blue skies.  Lyn settled down to some quilting after breakfast, and I did a little maintenance and then some work on the finances…. very depressing!

After lunch we headed out for a walk around one of the local sub-divisions, this time we chose the posher one! We racked up 1.9 miles today and the weight is still slowly going down for both of us.

Later on in the afternoon we headed out towards Brunswick for a trip on the “Lady Jane” a local shrimping boat that offers trips to the public. We went on this trip a few years ago and enjoyed it enough to go again.

The plan was to follow a channel out towards St Simons Island, on the way the boat would slow down and deploy its net. This would be repeated 3 times. When the catch was brought on board, one of the crew would explain what was in the catch.

Once the net was deployed, there was an immediate increase in the number of gulls and pelicans that started to follow us.

Bringing the catch in

The catch had a number of different species. Can’t remember what the one at the top is, but next down is a conch otherwise known as a whelk, and at the bottom is a tongue fish, also known here as a French sole

Southern Sting Ray

Below are two sides of a flounder. At birth the fish has an eye on either side of it’s head. As the flounder matures, the eye on the white side migrates through the head to join the other one. The two  eyes are visible on the dark fish.

A blue crab.

There were also silver trout, speckled trout, anchovies and toad fish.

Fish within a fish.

Just realised, we were on a shrimp boat, and there are no pictures of shrimp other than the out of focus ones in the picture above, sorry. At about the halfway point in the trip the crew boiled up some fresh shrimp that was caught on a trip earlier in the day, quite delicious!

With the catch laid out on a slab at the stern, it didn’t take too long for the braver of the pelicans to come aboard. A couple of kids were throwing some of the fish towards them and they were doing a fine job of catching them.

Waiting for food.

Thank-you!

On the way down the channel we caught sight of a mother dolphin and her calf. At the same spot on the way back the skipper stopped the boat, and after a few minutes mother and calf appeared and swam around for about 10 minutes. Unfortunately no pictures.

The Lady Jane

Woke up to a hot and sticky morning, with the temperature already over 21°C. Mid morning we decided to get in our daily exercise as the sky was looking pretty ominous to the west. As we were walking I suggested that we walk up and down the rows closest to the trailer, just in case the rain starts. At the furthest point from the trailer I said to Lyn we should had back using the shortest route we could. Back at the trailer, just as we closed the door, the heavens opened… perfect timing.

The storm carried on for about an hour with high winds, torrential rain thunder and lightning  and a drop of 6°C in the temperature.Light rain continued for a while longer.

During all this we managed a Skype call with Amanda and Noah, but the internet was not co-operating; as we found out a couple of weeks ago the internet here is allergic to rain.

After lunch when the rain had stopped we continued our walk in the cooler temperatures, racking up just over 1¼ miles.

The rest of the afternoon was spent between watching Canada beat the US in hockey at the Olympics and the resort fill up, it seems that the weeks good weather has brought out the weekend campers.

Yet another wake up to blue skies and warmth, so much so that my shorts were brought out of hiding. That’s probably jinxed the good weather.

This morning we hung around the resort doing mundane things like flushing out the septic tank, vacuuming and general tidying. After lunch Lyn had a hair appointment, so I tagged along and spent forty minutes in Lowe’s while Lyn was getting her locks chopped. After this we headed over to the other Island, St Simons. Here we headed down to the south end of the island in search of the beach and of course geocaches. Geocaching  didn’t go as well today, only 3 out of 5 found.

We headed onto the beach for some exercise, we had managed to somehow miss walking the last couple of days, so had to get back into the swing of it. This time the beach was well populated with people soaking up the sun. In fact it was quite foggy on the beach, I guess the heat of the sun was drying out the cold water from the sand and there was a thin fog blowing off the sand. The temperature inland was 26°C, but had dropped to 19 on the island. We managed about 1.5 miles of walking on the beach before heading back home.

Tonight was another BBQ meal, but that  may change tomorrow as thunderstorms are in the forecast.

Anne: Skyline dental, where did that come from?

Skyline Dent

A little overcast when we woke up, but that quickly gave way to blue skies, with a temperature of 20°C. Being Wednesday meant it was weekly shopping time. I even managed to throw in some geocahing to the weekly shop, there was a small cache hidden in one of the lights in the parking lot!

After lunch Lyn headed out to do more craft shopping, it seems the pending arrival of grand-son #2 has opened the doors to many craft stores.

While Lyn was out I continued building a model aircraft kit that I started last year, however it got a little warm inside the trailer. I decided it would be a good time to give the Air Conditioner a test run. It worked fine, pumping out air that was about 20° cooler than the ambient air. It wasn’t really warm enough to justify keeping the A/C on, particularly as there was a reasonable movement of air through the trailer. By this time the temperature had reached 29.5°C (86°F) outside.

I headed outside to continue my battle with Sudoku and enjoy the cooling breeze. With the return of the warm weather, the BBQ has become the cooking method of choice recently.

Another warm start to the day, although it was more overcast than recently.

After breakfast we had to head off back to Jekyll Island for some more geocaching. I say “had to” as an error was made yesterday that had to be corrected before anyone else discovered the cache. While we were out we headed up to the North end of the Island and found three more caches. There won’t be too many undiscovered caches on the island by the time we leave. Talking of leaving, we’re down to our last 10 days here, or in other words we’ve been here 5 weeks today.

At the last cache site we had a good view of the Sidney Lanier Bridge, complete with a Great Egret in the foreground.

For the first time we saw one of the large vehicle carriers that sail into the port of Brunswick on the move. As you can see they are pretty ugly beasts. This one, the Georgia Highway, weighs in at around 60,000 tons and carries around 5,000 cars. The port of Georgia handles mostly Hyundai, BMW , VW and Audi cars.

After lunch Lyn headed over to crafts and I hung around the trailer doing bits and pieces, I even sat outside for a while battling sudoku.

Lyn returned from crafts with one of her “less successful” projects, her words not mine. It started off life as a crocheted  basket. It then became a hat,

and very shortly thereafter it became two balls of yarn.

This is getting monotonous, yet another bright and sunny morning just as it should be.

After breakfast Lyn got busy quilting, this time it was an ongoing quilt project that started two years ago. I headed off to the school playing fields hoping to get some quadcopter flying in, which I did. This time I did not use the fully computerised flight mode at all, and even ventured a couple of times into the no-computer mode.

After lunch we headed out to Jekyll Island for some exercise. It was still bright and sunny and the temperature was up around 17°C, ideal for geocaching. The first find was reasonably easy, entitled “A 2 hour cruise” we were obviously looking for a boat.

One down four to go. The next two caches were further off the beaten track and took quite a bit of “bushwhacking” to find them, but find them we did. We found one more cache before returning to one that had defeated us a few days ago. This cache was a couple of feet off a bike path, as it turns out it was in this palm tree.

It was nestled in one of the cut off leaf stems at the back of the tree, about 5ft above the ground.

Today’s success made up for the dismal day we had on Saturday

As I have mentioned before, Jekyll Island charges an admission in the form of a parking fee as you cross the causeway onto the island. This money is plowed back into the upkeep of the island for visitors. There are cycle tracks around and across the island, all in great condition.

Some of the trees along the tracks are pretty large!

As we left the island we took a side road that led us down to the Emerald Princess

This is a casino ship that sails out beyond the federal limit every day to allow Georgia residents to get their gambling fix which they can’t get on land. A ticket costs just $10 which gives a 5 hour cruise, light meal and one free drink. Of course they are banking on you losing a few $$$$ at the tables.

The boat is docked under the impressive Sidney Lanier Bridge. This bridge is 2.3kms long and 150m high

Another beautiful morning, definitely could get used to this. Today, being Sunday, means it is laundry day so we spend the day at the resort. It is sometimes hit or miss whether the machines will be available when they are needed (so I am told).

This morning I spent many hours trying to remove the remaining old fog lamp from the truck so that I could replace it with the new one. The old fog lamp won, and I lost badly. My right arm is quite a mess from trying to reach into places it was never designed to go. At least now they both work; one just looks newer than the other, but that will probably change after a few hundred miles on the road.

After lunch Lyn managed to snag some washing machines, so while the washing was doing its thing we went off for our daily walk. We again went out of the resort but this time went the opposite direction from the sub-divisions around an area that looks as though it has been set aside for commercial use. This land hasn’t had anything new built on it since we first came down four years ago. This is a common theme down in the south. It appears that when the financial collapse hit, these places got hit hard. There are commercial properties that have been started, but never finished; sub-divisions that should hold a few hundred houses with only 10 or 20 in them etc.

We finished the walk about 1½ miles later, we were discussing on the walk how we would never have contemplated walking that distance just a few months ago, now it is a daily occurrence with no sore after effects. By mid afternoon the temperature was up around 18°C and we had clear blue skies.

Once back at the resort Lyn went to tend to the washing, and I headed out to the local school playing fields to get in some quadcopter flying. Unfortunately there was a bunch of kids at the playing fields, so there went that idea.

We had our weekly Skype session with Paul, Amanda and Noah. This week the connection was pretty good, and Noah has got used to seeing us appear on the computer screen!

Another warm night, although there was a massive downpour around 4AM. At wakeup time it was pretty windy, causing the trailer to shake a few times. After breakfast I waited for the wind to die down, and then went out to the truck to put in a new fog lamp. As I mentioned a few days ago, the retaining bolts were well hidden and this led to a frustrating period trying to get everything lined up and bolted in. Eventually everything dropped into place, and the job was done. Tomorrow I’ll try to remove the other lamp and put the new in.

This afternoon we headed out to the old rail-track for a walk and some geocahing. The walk went well with just under 2 miles covered, the geocaching not so much. We only found one out of four caches that we hoped to find. We now need a good day to restore our confidence!!

Below is a view of the rail-track walk crossing over a river with the track stretching out in the distance.

When we got back to the resort it was almost full, that’s around 160 RV’s. While Lyn was picking up the mail at the office she mentioned this and found out it’s a long weekend down here for Presidents Day. Guess that means we don’t have to work on Monday!

We woke up to a bright and sunny morning for a change. We decided to enjoy the change in weather by just hanging around the resort. Lyn had a “fun” morning with her sewing machine, unfortunately under threat of all things nasty I am prohibited from revealing too much more about the morning. Suffice it to say, reading manuals is always a good idea. For further information contact Lyn directly!

After lunch we headed out to the sub-division for our daily walk. There are three sub-sub-divisions close by, not sure how to put this in a PC manner, but each sub-division is a class above the other, so it makes for some interesting comparisons.

It is amazing the size of the air conditioners around here, most houses have two units and each unit is at least twice the size of the ones we have at home. We racked up close to 2 miles in our walk today.

Back at the resort, the place was filling up quickly. This park fills and empties continually. Some days there may be less than twenty RV’s here, other days there could be well over a hundred. We noticed a 5th wheel with both a truck and a Smart Car on one of the sites, given the truck pulls the trailer what happens to the Smart Car. Looking at the back of the fifth wheel, which was a large one, the whole back pulled down to make a ramp up into the trailer. The back of the trailer was a garage for the Smart Car!

Another warm day is forecast for tomorrow.