Our Travel Blog

Another clear sunny day with temperatures reaching 18°C, the big difference to day was the wind, or lack thereof! We’ve been here almost a week and so far I haven’t felt comfortable with making the first flight of the quad-copter. Today was the day. What was even better was the fact that there was a continual exodus of rigs from the resort, so there was no one around to watch me.

Following a quick read, yet again, of the instruction book it was time to head outside. In some ways the fist flight was an anticlimax, the beast is so stable very little work was needed to keep it under control. I must admit that I had the beast operating in its most stable mode where the GPS and altimeter do their best to keep the machine where I want it to be. There are two other modes to try once I get more confident, one still has stability assistance and the other relinquishes total control to the pilot. That should make for more interesting flights.

After one success it was time to try and regain our satellite signal. In theory all I had to do was rotate the dish left or right as all the other settings were still tightly locked in. In practice, the theory worked! It took about two minutes to get the picture back.

The replacement GPS arrived today, so I spent some time playing around with it. This time it worked fine.

After lunch we decided to put the new GPS to the test, so we headed out to the local State Park to try some geo-caching. This was a total  failure, out of 4 caches we went looking for all we found was:

The first cache seemed to have been covered in garbage, the second two had likely been removed as no one has found them since last summer and the fourth one we just couldn’t find, even though we knew it was there as someone found it yesterday. While we were at the park we took a walk around some of the trails, putting in about 1.5 miles.

Back at the RV resort it was still warm and sunny, so I decided it was time to clean the roof. I was not looking forward to this as the state of the front of the trailer suggested the roof would be a real mess. When I got up there I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was pretty clean. Even so it still took 90 minutes to clean it.

Another coolish night with temperatures down to 2°C, and cloudy in the early morning. The day cleared up and the temperature rose to 18°C with sunshine. This morning we headed out to do some shopping, Lyn needed some wool and I needed a mouse for the computer (the old one got left behind!). We also needed some batteries to replace the ones in the fire and CO detectors.

Back at the campground we stopped off at the office for some change for the laundry machines, there was also a package waiting for us there. The US still has a Saturday mail delivery. The package contained a repair kit for one of the window blinds in the trailer; the chord broke as we left last year, and now it’s time to see if I can repair it.

After lunch Lyn headed over to the laundry and I set about taking the blind down. I managed to get it fixed, and put it back up. Although it worked, it was not as smooth as it should be in operation plus there was a length of chord left over that shouldn’t have been there! A search on the internet suggested that I had not threaded the system correctly, so down it will come tomorrow and hopefully it will be fixed properly.

Next on the agenda was to check out the heating. The hot air vents in the floor seemed to be putting out far more air at the back of the trailer compared with the front. This resulted in a cool bedroom and cold bathroom. I couldn’t find any obvious blockage, but I did move an adjustable vent cover closer to the furnace and blocked off some of the air to the back of the trailer. So far tonight it hasn’t been cold enough for the furnace to come on, so I am not sure if it has made any difference.

With my jobs done and the laundry finished it was time to go for our daily walk. The resort seems to have a lot more “one nighters” rather than long term stays so there is plenty of movement throughout the day. With the walk over it was back to the trailer for afternoon coffee; for once it was warm enough to sit outside and drink it, although the wind of the last few days was still blowing.

That wind may have blown the satellite antenna out of alignment as we had no signal tonight. Hopefully it is just a matter of re-aligning the antenna and nothing more serious.

With all the work done today we’ll need a holiday tomorrow. Coincidentally there is a holiday down here, it is Martin Luther King day. I don’t think it is a full blown public holiday, but important enough for kids and government workers to have the day off!

It’s the weekend, time to relax and do nothing….wait, we do that every day. Another cool night and a cool day, sunny but only climbing to 10°C. We decided that today would be a stay at home day. Lyn started work on a new quilt and then spent some time on a new jig-saw puzzle. I spent some time sorting out a misbehaving laptop, then once that was fixed it was time to sort out the finances and get all the records up to date. See life isn’t all fun, sometimes a little work is required.

After lunch we braved the (relative) cold, and clocked up 1½ miles walking around the resort. Other than that we pretty well did nothing for the rest of the day, life is good!

Last night the temperature the dropped to 1.5°C but the trailer kept pretty warm. This morning it was clear and sunny so after breakfast we headed off to the beach on Jekyll Island. This year we decided to buy an annual pass to get onto the island; it is normally $8 to cross over to the island, so after 6 trips we will be saving money. As this is one of our favourite places down here we hope to get our money’s worth.

Crossing the causeway onto the island we stopped to look for a geocache site which we found pretty quickly. We then headed to the far side of the island to try and find a second cache, unfortunately we didn’t find this one. The GPS on the phone was too erratic to follow accurately, plus the phone was not easily readable in the sunlight. Once we get the new GPS we`ll head back.

Next stop was the beach for our daily exercise, we clocked up 3 miles of beach walking, which is a pretty good achievement for us. We could probably see about 5 miles of beach and there were less than 10 people on it (probably all Canadian celebrating the warm temperatures).

Next was a well earned lunch, we brought our own to remove the temptation of eating anything with fries! As the day progressed the temperature climbed up to around 18°C

After lunch we headed off for a tour around the island, then back to the trailer.

The new GPS had arrived in our absence; considering it was only ordered around 10 PM last night, I was pretty surprised. The bad news was it didn’t work! I contacted Amazon through their web-site, explained the issue and asked for a replacement. Within 2 minutes a new GPS was being packaged up to be sent with one day delivery and instructions were sent as to how I should return the defective unit. The return instructions were to print out a form, parcel it all up and take it to the resort office where UPS would come along, stick a label on the box and take it away….. all for free. Pretty impressive really.

Back at the trailer we came across a mystery with the truck. While checking out the lights, we found an empty hole where one of the fog lights should be. All that was left was the wire and its connector, the bulb and its mounting bracket were gone. The one on the other side was loose and it seemed it had been tampered with, so I guess someone was after our lights. No idea when it disappeared, could have been at home, or in one of the motel parking lots.

Another sunny wake up, although the temperature was down around 3°C. The furnace kicked in about 20 minutes before we got up so the trailer was warm and cosy for breakfast.

We planned on getting out somewhere today, but decided to leave it until the afternoon  to when it should be warmer. This morning I played around with the quadcopter for a while, trying to get the motors spinning. After a quick search on the web it turned out that I was experiencing a common problem. The ‘copter came with a quick start guide, the full manual had to be downloaded. Once I read the full manual I discovered that two of the switches on the transmitter had to be in a certain position to allow the motors to start, once this was discovered they fired up as expected. Unfortunately it was a bit too windy for a first flight.

This what it looks like, the box underneath is a camera, which I don’t have on mine (yet!)

After lunch we headed out to St Simons Island for a number of activities. Lyn was material hunting as she is making a quilt as a wedding present and there just happens to (still) be a good quilt shop on the island. Material was successfully procured, after Lyn’s credit card was declined (more to follow). Next stop was the post office to mail off a parcel for a friend in Canada whose son is is at university in Florida. Finally it was off to the beach for some exercise, and an attempt at a new past-time… Geo-Caching.

What is Geo-Caching you may well ask? Thanks to our son Paul we have a few of the answers. There are millions of caches throughout the world, some are as simple as a small container holding a paper log sheet that you sign to prove you have found it, others contain items that are on the move. These items have been placed in a cache by someone who wants it to get to a specific destination. When some else discovers the item, they can take it and place it in another cache nearer to the intended destination. Obviously, for me to be interested in this electronics and computers need to be involved. All the caches are listed on a web site (geocaching.com) from this you can get a description of the cache, the lat / lon close to the cache and clues as to how to find the cache when you get to the lat / lon position. The clues can range from simple to cryptic to mathematical. Today Lyn and I went looking for our first cache on the beach, what’s more we (well, Lyn) found it. We have decided that geo-caching will exercise both the mind and the bodies, so we will continue with it. Just need to get a new GPS now.

After finding the cache we headed off down the beach for some exercise, back home we were walking over a mile a day until the -20 weather hit, so we have not walked too much since December.  Hopefully we will get back into the swing of things, and we can lose a little more weight, we’ve both lost around 20 lbs since November and feel better for it.

Back at the trailer it was time to phone the credit card company as we both had a credit cards declined in the last couple of days. Usually we advise the company that we will be travelling, but this time I forgot and they flagged our spending habits as unusual!

Warm and sunny to start the day, with temperatures climbing up into the high teens (C). A few more setup chores were left to do today. The barbecue needed to be assembled and connected up to the gas supply, that was the easy one. Next came the satellite dish, ideally we’d have a system similar to the big mobile homes; these have a half dome on the roof which houses a motorised satellite antenna. All you have to do is power on the beast, it will get it’s position from its built in GPS, calculate where the satellite should be and point the antenna at it, all in about 30 seconds. The downside is that they cost around $2500.

The poor mans way of doing the same is to get you position (GPS or Google Maps will do), then go to a web site and calculate the azimuth, elevation and skew that the antenna should be pointed in. Next dig out the tripod and anchor it to the ground so that the centre pole is as vertical as possible then mount the satellite dish on the tripod. Next task is to point the antenna according to the calculations you made earlier and then connect the antenna to the receiver. At this stage (in theory) you should have a perfect picture on the TV…. wrong, invariably there will be nothing on the TV. Now its time to tune the satellite receiver to the setup page and “wiggle” the antenna in all three directions until the receivers shows you have some kind of signal. Once there is a small signal “minute wiggles” are made until the signal is at its peak. On a good day about 15 minutes are needed to complete this task, on a bad day this can stretch into hours. Never mind, it takes many hours (or a lottery win) before there is justification for the automatic gizmo. All that to say we now have TV, which is an improvement over last year!

Lyn decide to head out on her own to do some shopping, leaving me a couple of hours to unpack my new toy, a radio control quad-copter. In effect this is a helicopter with 4 rotors, this should make it a lot more stable and easier to fly than the helicopter I had previously. One day I’ll manage to control one of these things. So far I have managed to set it up with my transmitter, but I am having an issue getting the engines to work, at least there is less chance of crashing it in that state.

It was warm enough to sit outside this afternoon for coffee, and Lyn stayed out reading for a while. Most of the puddles from yesterday have now dried up. Tonight it is forecast to drop to around freezing, so the thermostat has been set up and the furnace tested to keep us alive over night.

It was great to have a day with no driving!

Woke up to a wet morning, judging by the puddles in the parking lot  it seems there was a fair amount of rain overnight. We hit the road around 9:00 and traveled through a mix of drizzle and showers. As we got close to the Georgia border the rain eased up and patches of blue began to emerge in the sky, by this time we were up to 18°C.

First stop once we arrived was to pick up the trailer from the storage place, unfortunately the place was a quagmire as they were in the process of remodeling the area and there had been some heavy rains recently. Luckily the trailer was in a not so flooded area, and although the wheels had sunk down a few inches we were able to pull it out OK. Unfortunately, the rain down here isn’t too clean, so another round of trailer cleaning is on the cards.

We pulled the trailer across the road to the resort and checked into the office, for some reason we were recognised immediately. Once we handed over our money and picked up the mail we drove round to the site. We recognised a few people / trailers from previous visits.

The rest of the day was spent setting up the trailer and shopping for food. We got most of the setup completed, just need to align the satellite dish and we should be done.

After all the driving I intend to avoid the truck for the next few days if it involves journeys of more than 20 miles!