Our Travel Blog

Back to being a little chilly this morning, single digits in fact at 9.7°C.

After breakfast it was time to work on getting the trailer ready for tomorrow. Time for some of the gorier stuff now, I have to deal with it, there is no reason I shouldn’t write about it. We have 4 tanks under the trailer, each with 84 gallons capacity. One is fresh water which we never use as we can connect direct to city water. One is grey water from the bathroom, one is grey water from the kitchen and finally is the black water tank.

The two grey water tanks are usually left open and the contents flow directly into the sewer system. The black tank is normally closed, this keeps all the solids and liquids in the tank until it fills up, then they are all flushed out together. If the tank was left open all the time the liquids would flow out and the solids would take up residence… not good. Anyway, I decided all the tanks need a good clean out, so the black tank was emptied and flushed with clean water. All tanks were then closed and filled with about 10 gallons of fresh water. Together with today’s waste each tank will be about a quarter full when we set off tomorrow. The plan is that the sloshing around in the tanks while traveling  will give them a good cleaning. If there is enough interest I’ll give a blow by blow account of how it works out when I drain the tanks :-).

After a bit more cleaning up outside we had lunch, and, as the weather was better than expected, we headed out to Jekyll Island for one last visit. Of course geocaching figured into the trip, and we went out on a good note getting 4 for 4. We went up to the north end of the island towards the North Beach.

This tree looked a little stunted in its growth, with all branches starting out at a flat spot few feet off the ground

One of the caches was near a pond, with the normal warnings down here.

Walking along the beach we were overtaken by one of the large car carriers, it came pretty close to the shore.

The ship will shortly make a right turn and go under the Sidney Lanier bridge in the background.

Back at the resort we finished packing as much as we could, so it shouldn’t be too much effort to finish up and head out in the morning.

Early evening saw a rather colourful sunset, although the picture doesn’t really do it justice

Woke up to cool wet weather. The rain started sometime overnight and continued through to early evening, not a pleasant day. Thankfully the forecast for the next two days is for sun and warmth, so we should be able to get the packing up done in comfort.

What else is there to do on rainy days other than shop. This morning it was the weekly grocery shop, and this afternoon Lyn made her final pilgrimage to Jo-An fabrics. I fear that store is going to see a huge downturn in sales after today!

That’s about it for today, there may be a few short blogs for the next couple of days, and normal service should be resumed by Sunday.

No change to the weather, warm air and blue skies. Life is so difficult.

As is usual the morning is spent waking up, quilting, computing etc! Once that was done we headed off to walk the “big loop”.  In previous stays here we had always joked we would take this walk, but never felt fit enough to actually do it. Today it was just another walk, no stress!

After lunch, which we have been having outside for the last few days, Lyn headed off for her last crafts meeting. While she was away I headed up to the roof and started to dismantle all of the antennas I had put up there. As the afternoon wore on the temperature increased and working on a white roof got pretty warm. Finally all the bits were down and packed away, and all the cables were wound up and stowed away.

I forgot to put a couple of pictures in yesterday showing it truly is spring down here, antirrhinum and flowering cabbage.

and an unidentified blooming bush.

Another warm night, although quite overcast when we got up.

After breakfast Lyn did some quilting while I hit e-bay looking for a replacement for our super-duper-does-everything remote for the entertainment systems. It has been getting a little finicky lately, and doing odd things in the middle of watching TV!

After lunch we headed out to the USCG (Coast Guard) station near Brunswick. There was a nature walk there, together with a geocache site. The walk was a fairly short one for us (would have been a fairly long one last year), but it had some interesting information on wildlife , trees and shrubs in the area. We saw what we thought were some type of mushroom growing on the ground, but we haven’t managed to identify it, any answers?

There were also a number of southern red cedar in the area, this looked a lot different from other trees as the trunk splits into multiple limbs close to the ground.

Further round the trail we headed down a boardwalk to a flat marshy area. This type of area is very common within about 10 miles of the coastline down here. If ever global warming takes hold (after this winter that’s a big “if”) a lot of this area will be flooded out. The vast expanse of greenery (brownery) is sea grass. In the background is St Simons IslandThe flatter area towards the front of the picture had hundreds of small crabs wandering around until we went to join them, then only a few were left the rest having disappeared down holes. These crabs were around 1.5 inches long.

Before we left we managed to find the cache as well.

We headed over to Jekyll Island for what may be our last trip as the weather forecast for the next few days isn’t too good.

We managed to find 3 out 3 caches on the island so that was a good way to spend our last afternoon there. We did see one of the more superfluous signs we had ever seen on the edge of a golf course. The nearest water was the coast about a mile away.

On the way back to the RV we stopped at two more caches and found both. We also stopped at the supermarket for a spaghetti squash. This squash was later to earn fame as a new weapon of mass destruction.

Despite Lyn having put numerous vent holes in the squash before putting it in the microwave, it still managed a pretty good explosion while cooking.

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