Our Travel Blog

The usual start to the day, cool overnight and clear blue skies in the morning. After breakfast we (Lyn) made up a picnic lunch and we headed out to Big Lagoon State Park, just over the State line in Florida.

We left the car in the parking lot and headed over to a lookout tower, which coincidentally was home to a geocache. Unfortunately, from a geocaching point of view, the tower was three stories high, this meant the coordinates pointed to a location that could be on any of the three floors. Of course the cache was on the last floor we checked, it was pretty well hidden but Lyn managed to spot it. The view from the tower was pretty spectacular, I had forgotten how white the sand was in this area.

Above is a small sand bar in the lagoon, and below is one of the trails, both showing the white sand.

The park had a number of trails, so we chose one and headed off for our daily exercise. Knowing that we were going out for a meal tonight I walked in the deeper sand on the paths to get more exercise!

After a couple of miles we had built up enough of an appetite to demolish a late lunch and head out of the park.

On the way home there was a shop Lyn had wanted to visit so we stopped there for a while.

In the evening we headed out for a meal to celebrate out anniversary, I don’t think the scales will be our friend tomorrow!

Another cooler night to clear out the hot air, then woke up to yet another beautiful day. Once breakfast etc. was out of the way we headed out for our morning exercise by walking around the resort. Slowly the place is filling up, but most of the long term people won’t arrive until after American Thanksgiving.

After lunch, the mail arrived and with it a couple of parcels for me. We decided to try out some LED lights in the trailer. The current ones are small 12 volt “wedge” bulbs, these give off a yellow light rather than white. Because the trailer works off 12 volts the voltage is not constant, rather it will slowly drop until it reaches a certain voltage, then the charger would kick in. This means that the lights would slowly dim then suddenly get brighter. The LEDs work off 8 volts to 30 volts without changing brightness, so with the LEDs we theoretically get a brighter, whiter consistent light. In practice we got a brighter, whiter consistent light, so we are now happier campers. The rest of the trailer will be converted shortly.

The second parcel was a toy for me. A couple of weeks ago Lyn mentioned that it might be fun if she had her own GPS for geocaching, rather than just following me around in circles. I thought about this for a couple of nano seconds and gallantly offered to give Lyn our current GPS. This meant I didn’t have a GPS now, better go buy another one, it was pointless buying the same one (we may have a problem sorting out which is which) so I bought the next model up which is a different colour, problem solved! The fact that the new model had more bells and whistles was an added bonus.

Once the new toy had been checked out it was time to put up an antenna so I can do some radio work, luckily there is a tree a few yards behind the trailer that could support one end of the wire, and the trailer supports the other end.

Tomorrow is our 38th wedding anniversary so we are heading out to Florida for the day

Again another cool night, ideal for cooling the trailer down and making sleep easy.  Again we woke to a beautiful sunny morning. After our usual morning rituals we headed out to Foley to a park downtown that has a rose walk, combined with a number of geo-caches along the route. The start of the walk is at the old railway station and heads north for about 3/4  mile. Very soon after the start there construction right on the walkway, it turns out that the town is about to celebrate its 100th anniversary of incorporation (you’ve got to love these old towns!) and they are building a 32 bell bell-tower in celebration.

Most of the roses along the walk were no longer flowering, but there were a few late bloomers evident. Likewise most of the geo-caches along the route were not there either. Out of the five we looked for only two were found. We didn’t feel too bad as two of those we didn’t find hadn’t been found by a number of people before us. Given the popularity of the area they had probably been accidentally discovered and removed.

On the way home we stopped off to top up on our food supplies, then we stopped at the office to finalise our departure date and also book in for three nights when we come back down in January. For those of you who don’t know, we are finally going to take the trailer on the road next year. Starting in January we will head towards Arizona and over the next few years head to the Pacific coast and then north to Washington state. After that we will continue to tour and probably finish up back in Georgia or Alabama and find a permanent site.

Back at the trailer it was time for lunch and an afternoon of sitting out side doing (practically) nothing. My problem is I can’t do nothing for too long, so I found a couple of odd jobs that needed doing just to keep me sane(ish).

There is still one major job that needs doing, the annual washing and waxing of the trailer, but I am putting that off for a few more days yet.

Another coolish night, but woke up to sun,sun and more sun. Daytime temperatures are in the high 70’s dropping down to the mid 50’s at night. This means that the trailer gets pretty warm during the day, but the cooler nights help the heat dissipate for the next day so the air conditioner is not needed.

Once we got going this morning we took a two mile walk along the road that runs past the campsite, its pretty rural around here,even though we are less than a mile away from the large shopping areas. Along the mile stretch of road that we walked there were only 3 or 4 houses.

Back at the trailer I made a slight modification to yesterdays electronics clean up. The hard drive that the movies and TV programmes are stored on was located in a small cubby hole that amplified the noise when the disk was being used. The cure was simple, move it to a larger area under the TV.

After lunch Lyn headed off to the new Hobby Lobby store just down the road; by mutual agreement I did not go! We figured I’d be in and out the store in about ten minutes, Lyn would take a little longer! In the mean time I played around with a few “toys” and spent some time outside doing battle with Sudoku. Lyn returned about 2 hours later.

So far we have managed to BBQ every night, this is a great improvement over our trip here last spring where the weather was cold enough to avoid outdoor cooking.

All the jobs that “had” to be done have been done, there are a few jobs that are left that can be done if and when I get around to it.