Our Travel Blog

Well yesterday’s title may have been a little premature, today was noticeably cooler, in fact it only just managed to reach 73°F, may have to seriously consider breaking out the winter woollies.

I decided to start work on washing the trailer this morning, I figured I’d do half today and half tomorrow. As it was the cleaning went very well and I got the whole it finished in one go. A year ago I would have probably quit half way through, but with the weight loss since then, the energy level has increased. Speaking of weight loss, it continues! I had reached a point where I had felt I’d achieved what I had set out to do, i.e. get the weight down into the “normal range” and feel healthier. Despite increasing my food intake a bit, the weight is still dropping! I guess I’ll just plod along and see what happens, there’s still plenty of pounds left until I hit the underweight category!

After lunch we headed down to the beach on the Gulf of Mexico for our first beach visit. It was nice and sunny, not too hot and not too windy….. ideal really. Considering the size of the beach it was pretty well deserted. Today’s exercise was a stroll along the beach, which is always harder work than walking on hard surface roads.

Back at the camp site I was blinded by the brightness of our newly cleaned trailer, well not really, but that may be the case in a day or so after I get around to waxing and polishing it.

I noticed in the trees behind our trailer that there was a hint of fall colours creeping in, nowhere as near picturesque as up north, but at least there was something. You may need a magnifying glass to see the red leaves in the pictures.

For the rest of the afternoon I amused myself installing the rest of the LED lights in the trailer. Now the conversion is finished we have a much brighter, whiter light throughout. Time for the next project, which will require a torque wrench and hydraulic jack!

Again, a cool night leads into another hot day. Today we climbed up to 30°C and for the first time humidity came into the picture as well. The threat of rain and storms that the forecasters have been pushing for the last few days don’t seem to have materialised.

This morning was quilting time for Lyn, she was working on a quilt she has had for some time now, unfortunately things didn’t seem to be going as planned. After lunch we were planning on heading down to the beach, but Lyn was still having some issues taming the quilt so we stayed put. I picked up some mail from the office, which included the second batch of LED lamps for the trailer, and a hydraulic jack. The jack will undoubtedly feature in another entry!

I decided to put the lamps in while Lyn worked on the quilt, unfortunately these lamps were a little different from the first set. Suffice it to say that I needed to rewire a few of the sockets to get the polarity right for the lamps. Some times nothing is simple, lighting or quilting.

Mid afternoon we took a shortened walk around the resort as the heat and humidity were a little high. As we didn’t get to the beach today, we headed over to the pool, the water was refreshing and cooled us down nicely.

As I am writing this, the rain finally arrived….. for 30 seconds!

See previous posts for wake-up weather, because it hasn’t changed too much, yet. We got up to around 83°F (28°C) after lunch, with a few clouds rolling in.

I had decided that to day was the day to clean the roof; the roof of an RV is effectively a large rubber like sheet stretched over the roofing material, and it has a tough life as it is continually exposed to harsh sunlight. Once a year it needs to be cleaned and conditioned to prevent it breaking down and cracking. If that happens it’s time for an expensive new roof.

Once this morning I arrived I wasn’t so keen on the idea, it was going to be hot up there. The forecast for the next couple of days is warm but cloudy, if we take this thought a little further…. Lyn does the laundry on Tuesday, if it is cloudy the clothing won’t dry as well. I gallantly suggested that Lyn may want to do the laundry today, but that meant I wouldn’t be able to do the roof as it would splash the laundry. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made. Lyn was not too sure about my master plan. Well at least I tried.

Off to do the roof, not enough roof cleaning product, that wasn’t planned but may help!  By now Lyn was thinking it may be a good idea to do the laundry while it was sunny. Finally I had my reason to avoid the roof for today.

After Lyn put the laundry in the machines we headed off for a walk around the park before it got too hot.

After lunch we headed out to get some roof cleaner, as long as it is cloudy tomorrow the roof will be done, unless …………

Yet another cool night, but a much warmer morning. As the day wore on the temperature climbed up into the 80’s and for the first time since we have been here there were clouds in the sky!

Once we got sorted out after breakfast it was time to give Lyn a lesson on her “new” GPS in preparation for an afternoon trip out.

After lunch we headed out towards the coast and a walking trail that we hadn’t been on before, and as expected there were a number of caches to be discovered along the way. By now the temperature was warmer than it had been for the last few days and the walk was going to be a good workout. After a couple of miles of walking we had found 4 out of the six caches we were looking for, the two we missed were in the more difficult category and had been missed by quiet a few people before us, so we didn’t feel too bad.

Most of the walk was along paved paths, but there was some sandy areas.

I guess by now these blog entries are getting pretty repetitive? Well, today will be no different. A cool night last night, and clear blue sunny skies throughout the day. We decided to just hang around the campground today and do more of nothing than usual, after all this is the weekend.

I managed to do very little for most of the morning before boredom set in, but there were no jobs that NEEDED doing (we’ll ignore washing and waxing the trailer in that statement).

After lunch we walked just under two miles around the resort, and stopped off at the office to check on the mail. I know, it’s Saturday, but the U.S. Postal Service still has a Saturday delivery, and the mail is still delivered to the destination address, not dropped off in a community mailbox. There was a package there for me, which was some more LED’s for different lamps in the trailer.

What should have been a simple swapping of bulbs turned into a 2 hour soldering and rewiring session. Suffice it to say, industry standard bulb sockets are not necessarily standard. I guess we have engineers to thank for that. Anyway, the job got done, and the lamp over the dining table and Lyn’s wall mounted reading lamp have been successfully been converted. The difference is amazing, particularly when you consider the original bulbs used 23 watts of electricity and the LED’s use just 3 watts, while giving out more light and just about zero heat.

Tomorrow is forecast to be same as the last week or so, we will probably head out towards the beach and wander around the trails in that area.

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.