Our Travel Blog

A little overcast when we woke up, but that quickly gave way to blue skies, with a temperature of 20°C. Being Wednesday meant it was weekly shopping time. I even managed to throw in some geocahing to the weekly shop, there was a small cache hidden in one of the lights in the parking lot!

After lunch Lyn headed out to do more craft shopping, it seems the pending arrival of grand-son #2 has opened the doors to many craft stores.

While Lyn was out I continued building a model aircraft kit that I started last year, however it got a little warm inside the trailer. I decided it would be a good time to give the Air Conditioner a test run. It worked fine, pumping out air that was about 20° cooler than the ambient air. It wasn’t really warm enough to justify keeping the A/C on, particularly as there was a reasonable movement of air through the trailer. By this time the temperature had reached 29.5°C (86°F) outside.

I headed outside to continue my battle with Sudoku and enjoy the cooling breeze. With the return of the warm weather, the BBQ has become the cooking method of choice recently.

Another warm start to the day, although it was more overcast than recently.

After breakfast we had to head off back to Jekyll Island for some more geocaching. I say “had to” as an error was made yesterday that had to be corrected before anyone else discovered the cache. While we were out we headed up to the North end of the Island and found three more caches. There won’t be too many undiscovered caches on the island by the time we leave. Talking of leaving, we’re down to our last 10 days here, or in other words we’ve been here 5 weeks today.

At the last cache site we had a good view of the Sidney Lanier Bridge, complete with a Great Egret in the foreground.

For the first time we saw one of the large vehicle carriers that sail into the port of Brunswick on the move. As you can see they are pretty ugly beasts. This one, the Georgia Highway, weighs in at around 60,000 tons and carries around 5,000 cars. The port of Georgia handles mostly Hyundai, BMW , VW and Audi cars.

After lunch Lyn headed over to crafts and I hung around the trailer doing bits and pieces, I even sat outside for a while battling sudoku.

Lyn returned from crafts with one of her “less successful” projects, her words not mine. It started off life as a crocheted  basket. It then became a hat,

and very shortly thereafter it became two balls of yarn.

This is getting monotonous, yet another bright and sunny morning just as it should be.

After breakfast Lyn got busy quilting, this time it was an ongoing quilt project that started two years ago. I headed off to the school playing fields hoping to get some quadcopter flying in, which I did. This time I did not use the fully computerised flight mode at all, and even ventured a couple of times into the no-computer mode.

After lunch we headed out to Jekyll Island for some exercise. It was still bright and sunny and the temperature was up around 17°C, ideal for geocaching. The first find was reasonably easy, entitled “A 2 hour cruise” we were obviously looking for a boat.

One down four to go. The next two caches were further off the beaten track and took quite a bit of “bushwhacking” to find them, but find them we did. We found one more cache before returning to one that had defeated us a few days ago. This cache was a couple of feet off a bike path, as it turns out it was in this palm tree.

It was nestled in one of the cut off leaf stems at the back of the tree, about 5ft above the ground.

Today’s success made up for the dismal day we had on Saturday

As I have mentioned before, Jekyll Island charges an admission in the form of a parking fee as you cross the causeway onto the island. This money is plowed back into the upkeep of the island for visitors. There are cycle tracks around and across the island, all in great condition.

Some of the trees along the tracks are pretty large!

As we left the island we took a side road that led us down to the Emerald Princess

This is a casino ship that sails out beyond the federal limit every day to allow Georgia residents to get their gambling fix which they can’t get on land. A ticket costs just $10 which gives a 5 hour cruise, light meal and one free drink. Of course they are banking on you losing a few $$$$ at the tables.

The boat is docked under the impressive Sidney Lanier Bridge. This bridge is 2.3kms long and 150m high

Another beautiful morning, definitely could get used to this. Today, being Sunday, means it is laundry day so we spend the day at the resort. It is sometimes hit or miss whether the machines will be available when they are needed (so I am told).

This morning I spent many hours trying to remove the remaining old fog lamp from the truck so that I could replace it with the new one. The old fog lamp won, and I lost badly. My right arm is quite a mess from trying to reach into places it was never designed to go. At least now they both work; one just looks newer than the other, but that will probably change after a few hundred miles on the road.

After lunch Lyn managed to snag some washing machines, so while the washing was doing its thing we went off for our daily walk. We again went out of the resort but this time went the opposite direction from the sub-divisions around an area that looks as though it has been set aside for commercial use. This land hasn’t had anything new built on it since we first came down four years ago. This is a common theme down in the south. It appears that when the financial collapse hit, these places got hit hard. There are commercial properties that have been started, but never finished; sub-divisions that should hold a few hundred houses with only 10 or 20 in them etc.

We finished the walk about 1½ miles later, we were discussing on the walk how we would never have contemplated walking that distance just a few months ago, now it is a daily occurrence with no sore after effects. By mid afternoon the temperature was up around 18°C and we had clear blue skies.

Once back at the resort Lyn went to tend to the washing, and I headed out to the local school playing fields to get in some quadcopter flying. Unfortunately there was a bunch of kids at the playing fields, so there went that idea.

We had our weekly Skype session with Paul, Amanda and Noah. This week the connection was pretty good, and Noah has got used to seeing us appear on the computer screen!

Another warm night, although there was a massive downpour around 4AM. At wakeup time it was pretty windy, causing the trailer to shake a few times. After breakfast I waited for the wind to die down, and then went out to the truck to put in a new fog lamp. As I mentioned a few days ago, the retaining bolts were well hidden and this led to a frustrating period trying to get everything lined up and bolted in. Eventually everything dropped into place, and the job was done. Tomorrow I’ll try to remove the other lamp and put the new in.

This afternoon we headed out to the old rail-track for a walk and some geocahing. The walk went well with just under 2 miles covered, the geocaching not so much. We only found one out of four caches that we hoped to find. We now need a good day to restore our confidence!!

Below is a view of the rail-track walk crossing over a river with the track stretching out in the distance.

When we got back to the resort it was almost full, that’s around 160 RV’s. While Lyn was picking up the mail at the office she mentioned this and found out it’s a long weekend down here for Presidents Day. Guess that means we don’t have to work on Monday!

We woke up to a bright and sunny morning for a change. We decided to enjoy the change in weather by just hanging around the resort. Lyn had a “fun” morning with her sewing machine, unfortunately under threat of all things nasty I am prohibited from revealing too much more about the morning. Suffice it to say, reading manuals is always a good idea. For further information contact Lyn directly!

After lunch we headed out to the sub-division for our daily walk. There are three sub-sub-divisions close by, not sure how to put this in a PC manner, but each sub-division is a class above the other, so it makes for some interesting comparisons.

It is amazing the size of the air conditioners around here, most houses have two units and each unit is at least twice the size of the ones we have at home. We racked up close to 2 miles in our walk today.

Back at the resort, the place was filling up quickly. This park fills and empties continually. Some days there may be less than twenty RV’s here, other days there could be well over a hundred. We noticed a 5th wheel with both a truck and a Smart Car on one of the sites, given the truck pulls the trailer what happens to the Smart Car. Looking at the back of the fifth wheel, which was a large one, the whole back pulled down to make a ramp up into the trailer. The back of the trailer was a garage for the Smart Car!

Another warm day is forecast for tomorrow.

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