Our Travel Blog

Woke up to a high overcast but cool and dry morning. There was only one main thing we had to do today and that was to go shopping for a new hair-dryer. I had been using it with no problem, but as soon as Lyn turned it on it started to cough splutter and smoke, not necessarily in that order, before giving up the ghost. I took a quick look at it and condemned it to the garbage. A little later Lyn felt something in her hair, it turned out to be a small piece of metal ejected from the hairdryer.

Once the hairdryer excitement died down it was time to perform a service on Lyn’s sewing machine, not the one that was repaired last week but the OTHER one. Most trailers don’t even have one sewing machine, this one has two.

The promised rain had still not made an appearance, so we headed off to get a new hairdryer. I was also going to try my luck at getting a US credit card to avoid the pain of buying gas on my Canadian one. Over drinks last night two of the couples had said that they were able to get one with no problem from Bank of America. I went into the bank, but the waiting time was going to be too long, so we’ll try that another day.

Lyn was given some Jo-An fabrics discount coupons which expired today, and she couldn’t possibly let them go to waste, so guess what…………

Driving home we got a few splashes of rain but that was it.

After lunch we took the GPS out, not for geocahing this time, but to measure how far we walked. Up and down all of the “aisles” in the resort comes out at  1.3 miles (2.1 Km).

Still no rain, and the skies started clearing. I should have been a weather forecaster, you only have to be right some of the time.

Another sunny but cool morning, around 5°C. As usual after breakfast we just lounged about doing nothing, just as well trained retirees should.

After lunch we headed about 10 miles south of here to what used to be an old railway line, but has now been turned into a walking trail. Of course we discovered this through geocahing. Today was not a good day as we only found 3 out of the 5 caches we were looking for. In fact it was almost 2 out of 5. We couldn’t find the very first cache we were looking for so gave up and moved on. When we came back to the truck I had a quick look around for the first cache again and found it lying under some leaves. It was a small 1″ x .25″ cylinder that had become dislodged from its hiding place. Luckily it was metallic purple in colour and I managed to catch a quick glimpse of it as I rustled through the leaves.

We clocked up just under 2 miles of walking on the old rail bed which was nice and solid under foot. I wouldn’t want to do the same trip in a few weeks time as the track has stagnant water on either side of it making an ideal habitat for mosquitoes.

At one of the caches we didn’t find we even had some volunteer help

It was interesting seeing some of the housing in the 10 miles we traveled. There were a number of  gated communities with their large houses , a number of well kept large houses on their own property, and intermingled with these were a number of run down shacks and trailers just off the side of the road. This intermingling of properties is quite common down here.

Tonight a group of 9 of us got together to go down to the local restaurant for Happy Hour. The group consisted of the craft ladies and hubbies. Although a number of us had not met before, a good time was had by all.

As promised by the weather bods with their crystal balls, it turned cooler over night with a wake up temperature of 5°C; however it was a beautiful, calm and sunny morning. After yesterday’s traumatic experience with the internet we were both pleased to see it up and running at full speed. Full speed is actually not too bad for a campground as we get about 1.3Mb/s. Unfortunately for Lyn she was having problems of her own. She was trying to pay a bill on-line and every time she tried to do anything the bank signed her out; she wasn’t a happy camper (literally). Next she tried to watch a video and the computer froze on her.. that was the end of her computing for the morning.

After lunch we headed out to St Simons Island to take a walk around a botanical trail in one of the parks. We logged up another mile or so on the walk. After the walk we hunted down a few more geocaches. Again we were 100% successful and found the 4 caches we were looking for. Three out of the four were part of a series of caches called the “Guardian Series”, each one of them was guarded by an animal.

After the forth find we decided to head back as it was cooling down and the blue skies were being replaced by grey clouds.

As the evening wore on the rain started, but as Lyn said we are warm cosy and dry in the trailer, so let it rain. Checking the radar, it looked like frozen precipitation about 40 miles north of us.

Another warm night and wake up temperatures in the mid-teens. After breakfast we were both doing our “internet checking” when it started to rain and disaster struck! The internet went down(ish). It would allow us to connect for about 15 seconds, then kick us off for a few minutes. This was not good, what else could we possibly do when it is wet outside and a WiFi free zone inside. Lyn had the quick answer to that one, go shopping!

It was grocery shopping day anyway, plus Lyn had a 40% off coupon for JoAnn fabrics AND it was seniors day at JoAnn fabrics which gave her 20% off everything, even stuff bought with the 40% off coupon.

Some time later we made it back to the trailer. Unfortunately the WiFi was still misbehaving.

After lunch it was very humid and the temperature rose to 26°C, the humidex brought it up to 30°C. Lyn sat outside crocheting and I decided to adjust the antenna I put up yesterday. One of the neighbours came over and spent some time talking to Lyn about crocheting, and I just got funny looks from passers by when they saw me on the roof fighting a metal monstrosity.

The picture below shows the trailer with 6 antennas. A satellite dish, my shortwave antenna, two little antennas on the top of the steps, one TV antenna and the WiFi antenna on top of the TV one.

We later braved the humidity and the gathering black clouds and headed off for our walk. We dropped in at the office to collect even more mail and to report the WiFi problem. Evidently we were the only ones to report it. Back at the trailer I got a phone call from the WiFi company asking for details of the problem and a promise that it would be fixed in 20 minutes or the guy would call me back…. yeah right! Well, twenty minutes later it was fixed AND the guy called back, are you reading this Bell ⁄ Rogers?

Well we never got the thunderstorms that were forecast, but cooler (not cold) weather is on its way.

Woke up to mist and cooler temperatures this morning. The mist stayed with us all day making it quite damp feeling. The temperature managed to climb to 17°C. Lyn settled into sewing after breakfast and I decided to do some banking and get everything up to date.

After lunch Lyn headed over to the craft group meeting, there were 5 people there, 4 of them Canadian. While Lyn was over there it was time to put up another antenna. One of my recent purchases was an adapter for an adapter I already had! These two adapters are about the size of a USB memory stick and cost about $75 for both of them. When used as a ham radio receiver they provide performance that would have cost 1,000 of dollars a few years ago. The antenna was bought a few years ago when we first got the trailer, but hasn’t been used recently. I put the antenna together then headed up to the roof to install. This part of the activity always leads to interest from other RV’ers. The guy next door is convinced Star Wars has become a reality. With the antenna in place it was time to start “playing radios” again

Unfortunately an antennas worst enemy is lightning; guess what, thunderstorms in the forecast tomorrow.

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.

Another warm morning, although it was very foggy for a while, about 15°C when we woke up.

After breakfast I started looking at our furnace air distribution issues that I mentioned a week or so ago. This time I got all hi-tech and stuck the digital camera into the ductwork and took some pictures. What I saw explained the problem we were having, unfortunately it appears to have been engineered(???) that way. I guess in a way it makes more sense to send more hot air to the living area than the bedroom / bathroom, but it would have been nice if some sort of control was available to allow a choice.

After the I had cleared up from working on the ductwork Lyn headed over to the laundry and I played around with some electronic stuff. After lunch we decided it was time to get back into our walking We walked out of the resort and wandered around the local sub-division. Most of houses in this particular area were reasonably small. Very few of them had any landscaping in their yards. I am not sure whether this is through choice, or whether the climate down here makes it impracticable to keep the garden in good shape. There are plenty of trees in the area, it seems the don’t clear-cut the area before building, rather they just remove enough trees to build the houses. Talking of trees, there are a lot of “live oaks” in the area (they are the ones that host the Spanish moss), I often wondered where the name came from. It turns out that the live oak is an evergreen, it doesn’t go dormant so it is always live! Almost 2 miles later we were back at the trailer.

The weather was pretty warm by now, up to around 26°C so we sat outside for a while, Lyn reading and me trying to fix a persistent drip coming from one of the drain taps under the trailer.

Tomorrow is forecast to be an even warmer day, so we are going to head north to a wildlife area, hopefully with some geocahing on the way.

Woke up to a warm trailer and a healthy Lyn! The furnace didn’t come on at all last night so things are really looking up. Early morning temperature was 15°C and rising.

After breakfast Lyn carried on with her sewing projects for a while, and I went over to the local school with the helicopter. This time I stayed clear of the “beginners” mode, and went with the intermediate setting. All in all it went pretty well, a couple of heavy landings until I got used to the throttle response. Biggest problem I had was telling the front from the back. The back of the machine has a large LED light on it which shows the state of the beast. In my mind big lights are placed at the front of aircraft. This resulted in the helicopter get further away from me than I had planned a couple of times.

Back at the trailer I wanted to tackle a problem with a meter I have to help set up the dish alignment. It hadn’t been working and I thought the problem was that its batteries needed charging, unfortunately fully charged batteries didn’t solve the problem. I took it outside and connected it to the dish with a short length of cable; it then worked. Back inside and reconnected it to a longer cable I had coming from the dish… nothing. Putting on my Sherlock Holmes hat, obvious deduction was a bad cable. Replacing one of the connectors solved the problem. This episode got me to thinking about last years trip where we couldn’t get the satellite receiver to work, I now believe that the problem was caused by this cable. I have four cables I can use, but only need to connect two of them. I remember last year checking the cables and they all seemed OK when tested with a meter, but in this case the problem was that the centre wire was just a little too short to make a good connection. You live and learn.

After lunch we headed out to get reacquainted with geocaching. Again we chose 4 sites to go to and again we managed to find all 4 caches. One of the sites had a small natural well bubbling water to surface making for a soggy trek. Another site was at a bar-pit, which I had never heard of. Turns out it is a local expression for a gravel pit. Any way we managed to get our first decent walk in since Monday, which is a good thing as our weight loss has slowed right down. By mid afternoon the temperature had risen to the low 20’s and humidity was making it’s presence felt.

A week or so ago I asked if any one knew what the metal machine was that was in one of the pictures

This response from Charlie solves the mystery:

“The large iron  objects are fixed position gun placements from the Civil war era.  The muzzle loading gun is missing. The front end is fixed and the back end has the two wheels to move the gun to point in the right direction.”

Thanks Charlie.

Last night Lyn was suffering from a headache and cold -like symptoms, this morning she was no better so she just lounged around and impersonated me when I get sick!

The weather had warmed up nicely, and we hit about 15°C by mid-afternoon. Around that time Lyn was feeling a lot better, so we took a short walk over to the office and back. It was nice to wander round without a jacket on, and no cold (all relative) wind.

With the onset of both warmer weather and the week-end the resort began to fill up, it had really emptied out over the last few days.

Lyn continues to recover, so we may get to go out for a short while tomorrow.