Our Travel Blog

A cold night, and a cold morning. After breakfast we decided we would head up to Savannah. We had a couple of things we planned to do that didn’t need heat or sun!

Our first stop was at the museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force, a bomber group within the US Air Force. Unfortunately the museum was short on aircraft and long on the organisation of the Air Force, there was also a disproportional amount of displays referencing the Third Reich. Must admit to having a quick laugh at one of their descriptions of the British Submarine Spitfire (check the end of the blog if you don’t understand).

On the positive side, there was a B-17 there undergoing restoration.

There was also a baby Jeep there made out of canvas with a small 13HP engine. It was designed to be air transportable, which it was, but it didn’t have enough oomph on the ground.

We had planned to do some geocaching in the area of the museum, but with the temperature down at 2°C we abandoned the idea, with one exception. I’d read about a rather unique cache that I’d wanted to see. This cache was a mini hotel in a hotel parking lot.

After visiting the cache we headed down towards downtown Savannah to visit a couple of stores and have a late lunch.

The temperature remained at 2°C as we joined the Interstate back to Brunswick, we even saw a number of cars and trucks with some snow on them. We weren’t too far south of the “Historical Storm” The temperature slowly rose until it peaked at 12°C when we got back to the RV.

***British Submarine Spitfire should be British Supermarine Spitfire

Well, the furnace is back in service. It was around 4°C this morning, and didn’t rise much throughout the day. The winter storm warning remains in effect for just north of us, and Atlanta is preparing to shut down for the second time in a few weeks.

As the morning progressed the rain moved in, so Lyn decided to move out….. to the shops! The good news from Lyn after the shopping was that she has dropped down 2 clothing sizes.

The rain continued through the afternoon, so we just turned up the heating and hunkered down for the rest of the day. We didn’t even get to go for a walk.

As has been the norm recently, a couple of warm sunny days are invariably followed by cooler cloudy days. The latest winter storm seems to be approaching, but is not meant to get much closer than Atlanta, about 150 miles north west of here. The temperature was around 11°C for most of the day.

After breakfast I was playing around on the computer (surprise) and on a whim checked the Air Canada web site for prices to London for our upcoming trip. Up until the weekend the price had been $1100 return, or $970 if I wanted to route through Detroit and wait around 8 hours for flights. Today Air Canada spat out a fare of $880, I couldn’t believe it. This was one of the cheapest fares I had seen for a long while. Ten minutes later we had two tickets to London. A little later in the day I was reading a blog, and it appears Air Canada is offering discounts on some flights related to the number of Olympic medals Canada won on the day. Maybe that could explain the cheap fare. While on the Air Canada page, they were offering cheap car rental, normally I don’t bother with these offers but I decided to compare the rates against my usual rental agencies. Again I seemed to have found a winner, the prices were about $150 cheaper than other companies. The rental was with Hertz so I am not too worried about the rental product.

This afternoon was Crafts Club time for Lyn. I had some work I had wanted to do on the trailer for some time so I headed outside. A couple of support rails on the entrance stairs had rusted and caused the paint to peel off, so I cleaned it up and sprayed on some black rubber coating. Hopefully this will stop further rusting.

Yesterday I forgot to include a couple of pictures, so I’ll put them in now. On Jekyll Island there are a number of electric cars/carts on the road, which I haven’t seen else where.

There’s even a van version

Another warmish wake-up call this morning, a little overcast initially but showing room for improvement. After breakfast Lyn finished yet another project, a custom made bag to take all the geocaching stuff in.

We headed out to Brunswick, me to try and persuade the local bank to part with one of their credit cards and Lyn to look at some of the stores in the old part of Brunswick. Lyn came out of the trip more successful than I did. I guess one thing that Canada and the US don’t share is credit history, I have none! I was offered a credit card, in fact one with high limits. The catch was if I wanted a $5000 limit, there would be no problem as long as I lodged $5000 with the bank. I guess that would be a self funded credit card. I think I’ll put up with not being able to use my credit card on the gas pump machines down here.

After Brunswick we headed over to Jekyll Island for a walk and geocaching. We decided to walk along the beach, and yet again we were pretty much the only people on it.

We racked up 2 miles walking on the beach, then  had our picnic sitting at one of the many tables on the grass above the beach.

Time to go geocaching. We went to find a cache that we had not found on a previous visit. On that visit we were using the phone as a GPS and it was nowhere near as accurate as our new GPS. This time we found what we were looking for.

Above is a close up of the cache, below is from a few yards away

One of the caches was the smallest we have found to date. It was hidden on the cross piece of the sign shown below.

Below shows the size.

We managed to find 3 out of 4 caches today.

The weather continued to improve throughout the day, changing to clear blue skies and 22°C

Woke up to a high overcast but cool and dry morning. There was only one main thing we had to do today and that was to go shopping for a new hair-dryer. I had been using it with no problem, but as soon as Lyn turned it on it started to cough splutter and smoke, not necessarily in that order, before giving up the ghost. I took a quick look at it and condemned it to the garbage. A little later Lyn felt something in her hair, it turned out to be a small piece of metal ejected from the hairdryer.

Once the hairdryer excitement died down it was time to perform a service on Lyn’s sewing machine, not the one that was repaired last week but the OTHER one. Most trailers don’t even have one sewing machine, this one has two.

The promised rain had still not made an appearance, so we headed off to get a new hairdryer. I was also going to try my luck at getting a US credit card to avoid the pain of buying gas on my Canadian one. Over drinks last night two of the couples had said that they were able to get one with no problem from Bank of America. I went into the bank, but the waiting time was going to be too long, so we’ll try that another day.

Lyn was given some Jo-An fabrics discount coupons which expired today, and she couldn’t possibly let them go to waste, so guess what…………

Driving home we got a few splashes of rain but that was it.

After lunch we took the GPS out, not for geocahing this time, but to measure how far we walked. Up and down all of the “aisles” in the resort comes out at  1.3 miles (2.1 Km).

Still no rain, and the skies started clearing. I should have been a weather forecaster, you only have to be right some of the time.

Another sunny but cool morning, around 5°C. As usual after breakfast we just lounged about doing nothing, just as well trained retirees should.

After lunch we headed about 10 miles south of here to what used to be an old railway line, but has now been turned into a walking trail. Of course we discovered this through geocahing. Today was not a good day as we only found 3 out of the 5 caches we were looking for. In fact it was almost 2 out of 5. We couldn’t find the very first cache we were looking for so gave up and moved on. When we came back to the truck I had a quick look around for the first cache again and found it lying under some leaves. It was a small 1″ x .25″ cylinder that had become dislodged from its hiding place. Luckily it was metallic purple in colour and I managed to catch a quick glimpse of it as I rustled through the leaves.

We clocked up just under 2 miles of walking on the old rail bed which was nice and solid under foot. I wouldn’t want to do the same trip in a few weeks time as the track has stagnant water on either side of it making an ideal habitat for mosquitoes.

At one of the caches we didn’t find we even had some volunteer help

It was interesting seeing some of the housing in the 10 miles we traveled. There were a number of  gated communities with their large houses , a number of well kept large houses on their own property, and intermingled with these were a number of run down shacks and trailers just off the side of the road. This intermingling of properties is quite common down here.

Tonight a group of 9 of us got together to go down to the local restaurant for Happy Hour. The group consisted of the craft ladies and hubbies. Although a number of us had not met before, a good time was had by all.

As promised by the weather bods with their crystal balls, it turned cooler over night with a wake up temperature of 5°C; however it was a beautiful, calm and sunny morning. After yesterday’s traumatic experience with the internet we were both pleased to see it up and running at full speed. Full speed is actually not too bad for a campground as we get about 1.3Mb/s. Unfortunately for Lyn she was having problems of her own. She was trying to pay a bill on-line and every time she tried to do anything the bank signed her out; she wasn’t a happy camper (literally). Next she tried to watch a video and the computer froze on her.. that was the end of her computing for the morning.

After lunch we headed out to St Simons Island to take a walk around a botanical trail in one of the parks. We logged up another mile or so on the walk. After the walk we hunted down a few more geocaches. Again we were 100% successful and found the 4 caches we were looking for. Three out of the four were part of a series of caches called the “Guardian Series”, each one of them was guarded by an animal.

After the forth find we decided to head back as it was cooling down and the blue skies were being replaced by grey clouds.

As the evening wore on the rain started, but as Lyn said we are warm cosy and dry in the trailer, so let it rain. Checking the radar, it looked like frozen precipitation about 40 miles north of us.

Another warm night and wake up temperatures in the mid-teens. After breakfast we were both doing our “internet checking” when it started to rain and disaster struck! The internet went down(ish). It would allow us to connect for about 15 seconds, then kick us off for a few minutes. This was not good, what else could we possibly do when it is wet outside and a WiFi free zone inside. Lyn had the quick answer to that one, go shopping!

It was grocery shopping day anyway, plus Lyn had a 40% off coupon for JoAnn fabrics AND it was seniors day at JoAnn fabrics which gave her 20% off everything, even stuff bought with the 40% off coupon.

Some time later we made it back to the trailer. Unfortunately the WiFi was still misbehaving.

After lunch it was very humid and the temperature rose to 26°C, the humidex brought it up to 30°C. Lyn sat outside crocheting and I decided to adjust the antenna I put up yesterday. One of the neighbours came over and spent some time talking to Lyn about crocheting, and I just got funny looks from passers by when they saw me on the roof fighting a metal monstrosity.

The picture below shows the trailer with 6 antennas. A satellite dish, my shortwave antenna, two little antennas on the top of the steps, one TV antenna and the WiFi antenna on top of the TV one.

We later braved the humidity and the gathering black clouds and headed off for our walk. We dropped in at the office to collect even more mail and to report the WiFi problem. Evidently we were the only ones to report it. Back at the trailer I got a phone call from the WiFi company asking for details of the problem and a promise that it would be fixed in 20 minutes or the guy would call me back…. yeah right! Well, twenty minutes later it was fixed AND the guy called back, are you reading this Bell ⁄ Rogers?

Well we never got the thunderstorms that were forecast, but cooler (not cold) weather is on its way.

Woke up to mist and cooler temperatures this morning. The mist stayed with us all day making it quite damp feeling. The temperature managed to climb to 17°C. Lyn settled into sewing after breakfast and I decided to do some banking and get everything up to date.

After lunch Lyn headed over to the craft group meeting, there were 5 people there, 4 of them Canadian. While Lyn was over there it was time to put up another antenna. One of my recent purchases was an adapter for an adapter I already had! These two adapters are about the size of a USB memory stick and cost about $75 for both of them. When used as a ham radio receiver they provide performance that would have cost 1,000 of dollars a few years ago. The antenna was bought a few years ago when we first got the trailer, but hasn’t been used recently. I put the antenna together then headed up to the roof to install. This part of the activity always leads to interest from other RV’ers. The guy next door is convinced Star Wars has become a reality. With the antenna in place it was time to start “playing radios” again

Unfortunately an antennas worst enemy is lightning; guess what, thunderstorms in the forecast tomorrow.