Our Travel Blog

Well despite the doom and gloom spread around yesterday, we survived overnight and woke up to another cool morning. The temperature didn’t rise above 4°C all day, so it was another day in the trailer. Lyn started a wood-burning project that she has had for sometime. I actually started doing some income tax work on the computer, hopefully another rebate will be in order.

After lunch we decided we’d had enough of being in the trailer, so we rustled up a quick shopping list and headed out to the great metropolis of Brunswick. Other than that, another boring blog I’m afraid. Tomorrow the temperature should be up in the 60’s, so we can probably get back outside again.

Woke up to rain and cold this morning with the temperature around freezing point. We decided it was a day to hibernate, the forecast showed a high of 2°C with a rain / ice pellet mix. Lyn has plenty of sewing projects and as usual I have plenty of computer and electronic projects to keep me out of trouble.

By mid afternoon the rain had stopped, but the temperature hadn’t changed much. We decided to get a little exercise in and take a walk over to the office. When we got there the conversation immediately went to the weather. It turns out that the area was in a state of chaos due to the weather. Schools were closed, outdoor workers were not working and a number of cities in Florida, Georgia and Alabama were virtually closed down by freezing rain or snow. On the way back from the office there was even a brief snow flurry.

Unfortunately Georgia’s only snowplow was not up to the job of keeping the streets clear.

After chatting for a while at the office we headed back to the trailer. I checked the two propane tanks, and one had just emptied so I headed back over to the office to arrange to have it filled ……. just in case!

Woke up to a damp drizzly morning, but it was mild at 14.5°C. That wasn’t going to last. After breakfast we got ready to head out and do the weekly grocery shopping. The temperature had dropped to 12°C. Back at the trailer, all the groceries were unpacked and stored. With careful packing Lyn (I wouldn’t stand a chance) can get a whole weeks worth of supplies in the fridge / freezer. By now the temperature was down to 10°C.

In Alabama at our other site the temperature was -2°C, with freezing rain. In fact a look at the US map shows a winter storm warning active from the Texas / Mexico border right up to the Great Lakes.  Tonight’s forecast is for temperatures around freezing and ice pellets. Regardless it is still warmer here than at home and we haven’t gone through a cylinder of propane…. yet.

After lunch Lyn headed over to the crafts group and I rekindled the war with the sewing machine I was trying to repair. After a few hours I was able to declare a victory, the machine now works as advertised. I must admit I didn’t fully realise how much of a precision machine those beasts are.

Time to crank up the heating and watch TV.

Another warm night followed by a warm morning leading into a hot day. The laundry load was high this week so Lyn headed over to the laundry after breakfast to finish the job. It was warm enough to head out and finish washing the trailer. This was probably a record, only 3 sessions to clean the trailer.

The temperatures climbed up to 22°C after lunch so that was a good time to make sure that the air conditioner still worked… it did.

We had a quick session of ordering from e-bay / amazon. Lyn got a couple of craft books and I got some radio stuff. On line buying is so much cheaper down here. Although the cost of the product is the same, 95% of the time the shipping is free and there is no 13% sales tax.

Being such a beautiful afternoon we headed back to Jekyll Island for some exercise and geo-caching. This time we chose four caches up the north end of the island. We must be improving as we found all 4 caches.

Below is one of the caches, the first picture shows the “find”, it is an old flashlight covered in camo-tape. Inside the battery compartment is the log book.

This picture shows the  flashlight as we found it in the tree, all that is showing is part of the hook that is connected to the flashlight

As a bargain we picked up a “trackable”. A trackable is an object that some one has left at a cache, with it (or on the web) will be a request as to what the owner wants done with trackable. In this case the intent is to have the trackable travel to as many places as possible, with pictures posted on the geo-caching site of any unusual places visited.

One of the caches was close to an area called Driftwood Beach. We had visited the North end of this beach a couple of years ago, this time we came from the South. The beach is littered with dead trees, but they have been rubbed smooth by the sand and tide action. It looks as the trees were originally growing where they are now, but the land was eroded by the sea causing the trees to die.

Again we managed to get in a good walk on the beach, and along some very small footpaths.

If only this weather would stay, but the cold is on its way south.

Another warm night and morning, we are getting spoiled although it was quite foggy early on. Fog means no wind, no wind means good flying weather. As the morning progressed the fog lifted, so as Lyn busied herself with the laundry, I reluctantly left her and headed out to to the local school and it’s playing fields. Apart from a couple of short hops in a confined area this was to be the first serious flight of the quadcopter in an open space.

I got the machine set up and hit the throttle, up it went just as advertised. I was flying in what is known as safe mode, in this mode it is virtually impossible to crash the machine. If you let go of the controls the ‘copter will just hover where it is. A 15ft radius safe zone is established around the pilot by the helicopter, meaning that it is impossible to fly the ‘copter within 15ft of the pilot, if you try to bring it closer it will just stop. Bit like a force field on Startrek. If you descend too quickly it will slow its rate of descent automatically as it approaches the ground and land softly. The final part of the idiot proofing is Return to Home. If you lose sight of the helicopter, or get disoriented, just flick a switch and it will climb/descent to about 20ft and return to above the point it took off from and then land gently.

Of course, all this computerised control makes for boring flying, but at the same time provides a great training tool. A simple flick of a switch put the machine into stable mode, where the pilot has far more control, but the computer still aids in stability. Flicking another switch removes all computer assistance, and aerobatic flight becomes possible. I started playing around with the second mode for a few minutes before quitting. A good start to the day.

Back at the trailer it was warm enough to wash some more of the trailer, so another 1/3 was completed, no point in rushing these things!

After lunch I dug out an old project I had brought down from home. Lyn has an older sewing machine that was misbehaving, it was one of the earlier computerised models, and was having issues with patterned sewing. Let’s just say the afternoon was an exercise in frustration!

Evidently there was a brief shower early this morning, but I slept through it! The morning was definitely warmer, and blue sky was replacing grey clouds, things were looking up.

After breakfast Lyn settled down to some quilting, and I headed outside to remove the stuff from the storage compartment under the trailer. I was trying to work out why there was so little heat coming into the bedroom and bathroom. The first problem was on the floor of the basement area where there is an air outlet, this is there to keep the area warm and prevent pipes from freezing. The outlet had been broken by my repeatedly pushing a tool box in and out of the compartment; all the hot air was pouring out of the vent. Once this was repaired the air flow in the bedroom and bathroom was noticeably better but not great. The next issue appears to be a design issue which has the duct work going round way too many corners to move the air efficiently. This is a job for another day.

After lunch the temperature had risen to around 16°C so we decided to make use of our pass and head out to Jekyll Island again for some more geo-caching. Today we found all three sites that we were looking for. The more we do this the more we enjoy it. It really is a great way to get out and see areas we would never go to otherwise. Today’s area was at the south end of the island close to the beach. The caches were in an area were there were a lot of small pathways which were not heavily used. The caches themselves were usually 20 – 30ft off the paths, to prevent accidental discovery. Below are some photo’s showing what we were looking for.

A micro container after and before discovery

A small “ammo” container hidden in a split in a tree taken from a distance and close up.

This last one was “interesting” all the clues suggested the sandcastle was on the beach, in fact it was about 125ft from the beach. Once we found it and re-read the clues it became obvious that they were cryptic, but 100% correct. Not only do we get physical exercise, the brain gets a workout too.

While walking around the paths we came across a spring in a small pond, very reminiscent of New Zealand.

Close to one of the caches we found an unusual machine, in fact there were two of them about 50ft apart.

If you have any idea what it is please let me know.

Below are a couple of shots of trees and grass growing on the beach.

It is generally considered that Canadians are friendly, sharing people but in this instance can I politely request that you keep the censored Polar Vortex to yourselves? While we get some consolation in the fact that your temperatures are WAY below zero, ours should be way ABOVE zero, and they are not. Having said that, today’s high of 6°C will actually rise to 15°C tomorrow. For the time being we will ignore next Wednesday’s forecast down here for snow.

The temperature was cool enough to trigger a desperate need for retail therapy in Lyn; I wasn’t invited to participate!

The good news is, we both have plenty of hobby stuff to do down here, spending time inside is no big issue, we’d be doing the same at home anyway.

While Lyn was out I set about tracking down a possible water leak (what’s new). The space under the sink has being getting slightly wet, but with no obvious leak causing it. Today I cleared the area out, dried it and sat there watching to see where the water could be coming from. After a couple of minutes I was rewarded with a drip from the hot water pipe. The drip was only visible on the pipe for a couple of seconds every couple of minutes which is why I had missed it before. A quick tightening of the connection solved the problem.

Lyn came back after lunch suitably therapatised (new word?) and ready to relax. Later in the afternoon we went for our walk, and although the temperature was low, there was little wind and it felt quite warm in the sun

Last night we were advised to keep one of the water taps running slowly due to the risk of freezing water lines. We woke up to a cloudy cool day, around 2°C with a forecast high of 8. Not as warm as we would like, but still way warmer than home.

During breakfast Lyn noticed something that looked like ice around the water tap on the site next door. My first response was “don’t be silly”! After breakfast I went across to the site, and sure enough there was ice around the tap area which had formed after staff had opened up the tap slightly last night.

Again we had hobby stuff to do in the trailer while we let the temperature warm up. After lunch we decided to head down to Jekyll Island and see if we could find some more caches. The first stop was at the entrance to the causeway,  this was meant to be an easy find. We looked around and found nothing. Finally Lyn said there was a box under a bush, but it looked like an electrical box as there was a large wire coming out of it, in fact the wire was being used to anchor the box to a tree to stop it walking away! We had found our first cache of the day.

We went on to the island to look for four more caches and found 3 of them; the one we didn’t find had a difficulty level of 5/5 so we weren’t too upset at missing it. Many of the caches on the island are hidden close to walking or bike trails, so we get off the beaten track looking for them. Today we managed to get in at least a 1.5 miles walking hunting down the caches.

This will be a short posting this time as not too much happened!

It was cold last night (-1°C),  It only got to +8°C, but that was at least 26°C warmer than Ottawa. We both had plenty of “stuff” to do in the trailer, so that’s what we did.

We re-chorded the blind that we had worked on a few days ago, it now goes up and down as it should, and as a bonus there is no additional chord hanging down!

My hard drive on the laptop has been giving me grief recently, so a new one was ordered. It arrived today so I went over to the office to pick it up. In the mean-time Lyn started on vacuuming and housekeeping in the trailer.

The rest of the day was spent with me setting up the new drive and Lyn quilting, although we did take time out for our daily walk.

Hard to believe it, but we arrived a week ago. We have both settled in to trailer life as though we had not been away. Today was shopping day, and we headed off into Brunswick rather than shop locally. On the way back we filled up the truck with diesel, the price here is $3.80 US / gal. This equates to about $1.09 CDN / litre (including exchange rate) . Back home it is around $1.33. Unfortunately the Canadian $ is not our friend at the moment; this time last year the $ CDN was at par with the US $, now its about 10% lower.

After lunch Lyn headed over for a craft group meeting at the club house, this was the same craft group that she set up last time she was here so she was pleased to see that it was still running. While Lyn was crafting I decided that I really had to start cleaning the outside of the trailer. The front cap was the worst, but a bucket of warm soapy water, a brush and a hose pipe got it cleaned up again. In keeping with tradition, the trailer will be cleaned over a number of days!

Last chore of the day was draining and cleaning out the septic tank, I won’t bother to go into details of this….. yet.

When Lyn got back we headed out for a walk, and met up with another Ontario camper from Orangeville just North of Toronto. While we out walking there were dark clouds building up west of us, with strong winds starting. Back at the trailer the winds continued and a number of things around the trailer started blowing around, including the satellite dish. Last time I re-aligned the dish I put a piece of tape on it to show where the alignment point was, a quick twist of the dish had it aligned in 2 seconds!