For the first time on this trip we went 24 hours without any heating in the trailer. We woke up to sunshine and 20°C. Last night we decided it was time for a road trip, so we planned to head north about 40 miles to the Harris Neck Wildlife Refuge. We also planned to do some geocaching on the way.
After breakfast we packed up some drinks and lunch and headed out. We initially headed up the interstate to by pass the town of Brunswick. Once clear of the town we left the interstate and picked up the local road. We drove through the town of Darien, where we had a great shrimp lunch a couple of years ago. One of the caches in the town was called “Tabby Walls”, we had no idea what a tabby wall was at the time,but we do now. They are concrete walls that were quite common in the South East at the end of the 19th century. What differentiates them from other concrete walls is the concentration of sea-shells in the mix. The ones below are the remains of warehouses on the water front.
Heading out of Darien we came across a herd of Buffalo in the fields, unfortunately they weren’t wild, but were being raised on a farm. Further up the road we came across the smallest Church in America. This was built in 1949 by the local grocer as a non-denominational church for travelers on the highway.
The Church may be small (8 seats) but it is still in use, and has a number of stained glass windows.
We now turned to the east and headed to Harris Neck. We HAD to make one more cache stop as it was at an air strip! Just before got to Harris Neck we spotted an armadillo on the side of the road, unfortunately it was lying on its back and lifeless after an unscheduled encounter with a passing vehicle.
We made it to the refuge where we stopped for our lunch. The refuge was on an old Army Air Force base, although all that was left were the overgrown runways. Unfortunately there was not a geat deal of wild life visible. The alligators were no where to be seen, we did see some Kingfishers and woodpeckers as well as a number of turkey vultures.
Walking around one of the ponds we saw a number of groups of turtles
The drive around the refuge was through lots of live oaks covered in Spanish moss.
After we finished the tour around the refuge we headed back to the trailer via some small country roads where we found a few more caches, I think we found 9 or so caches on the trip. I avoided talking too much about the caches for fear of boring you! For us the caching has really allowed us to see more of the countryside than we normally would. For instance, today’s trip. Normally we would just drive to our destination, look around and then drive back taking at the most 2½ hours. Today we were out for around 5 hours and walked more than 2 miles looking for caches.
It stayed warm enough to BBQ and eat our evening meal outside.