Our Travel Blog

Well, after a wet day yesterday we woke to clear blue skies and COLD, ok it’s all relative but it was only 7C!!

We were on the road by 9AM to got to Savannah about 80 miles North. The plan was to take a Hop On – Hop Off bus tour of the historical part of the city. The tour was fine, but Lyn and I both had a (wrong as it turned out) pre-conceived idea of what we would see. We were expecting large, colourful mansion / plantation houses on 1+ acre lots. In reality there were a lot of mansions, but they were mostly brick and had little or no land. Despite that we had a great tour driver and learned a fair bit about the city.

We went to a riverside seafood place and had a great lunch. The weather remained cool around 15C with blustery winds

Next stop was a River trip on the Savannah River, unfortunately this was not really worth it. Again we were expecting to see mansions and gardens on the river, all we saw were a number of dockyards, silos, container ports and a large pile of saw dust destined for Ikea in Sweden.

Rather than take the tour bus back to our truck we took a walk throught the Old City Market, this was more a series of a street cafes rather than a retail market. All in all it was an interesting (and apaert from the boat tour) worthwhile trip. On the way home Lyn raided JoAnn fabrics and got a lot of stuff she wanted / needed / desired. I paid a trip to Barnes and Noble to pick up a “nook” e-Book reader to replace the one that died recently

The title says it all!

Well the day started off bad, and didn’t improve too much. Due to an annoying cough I had to get up a couple of times during the night.

After breakfast I set about tyring to fix my APAD (like an IPAD) book reader. One of the buttons was misbehaving. I just about had it fixed when it slipped out of my hands and hit the edge of a table, cracking the screen. Well the switch was fixed, the crack hardly showed BUT the touch screen only worked to the right of the crack, which was only an inch or so from the right side of the screen 🙁

Later in the day, I removed a stereo plug from the computer, unfortunately the last 1/8″ or so came off the plug and stayed inside the socket. About an hour later I finally coaxed it out. This time there was no further damage to the computer, unlike the APAD.

Weather was dull and cool (20C), although t-shirt and shorts were still the dress code of the day. We went back to St Simons Island and drove around parts we missed last week-end. There were some VERY large houses up the north end of the island. We went back to the beach where the “Worlds Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party” had been held last week-end and it was deserted, we maybe saw about 10 people on a mile of beach.

Today was the first not so good day weather wise. Cloudy, drizzle and about 20C. We’ve been here 2 weeks now and we’re still both alive….. shot a few peoples predictions down!

Another antenna arrived today for my Ham Radio set up, unfortunately it was a bit too windy to risk going up on the roof, so I strung it up in the bushes next to the trailer. Plugged it in, and it worked like a charm!

Spent the rest of the day hooking the transmitter up to the computer, I was pleased to see that I hadn’t lost my touch when it comes to making a mess all over the trailer with tools, cables etc…. just like home!

The wind has been gusty all day, now it is getting strong enough to start rocking the trailer, although at 10,000 lbs it shouldn’t move too far!

Finally, the remote control WE left behind has arrived. Now we can start watching the movies and TV episodes that I downloaded without having to boot the laptop into Linux, connect to the external hard drive, copy to the windows area of the laptop, boot into windows and connect the laptop to the TV. Kind of took the enjoyment out of watching the programme. Thank-you Catriona.

Today was a shopping day, groceries in the morning, and off to explore the larger stores in the afternoon; Target, Lowes, Michaels (couldn’t avoid it, but I got suckered in by Lyn pointing out that there was a Circuit City right next door, unfortunateley the only thing Circuit City about the store was the sign, the rest was an empty shell).

In future my sister Hazel, has volunteered to provide titles for the blogs if I can’t come up with a suitable one……. should be interesting!

The hardest part of writing this blog is coming up with a title each day!

Another warm and pleasant day, time to clean more of the trailer. To do today’s cleaning required I put one of the slides in. No big issue, just move a couple of the chairs and make sure there is nothing in the way. Slide in, clean the outside and slide out. All went well, apart from a few pieces of cable lying on the ground.

When I put up my radio antenna a few days ago, I coiled up the excess wire and hung it under the slide out. Said coil of wire got rather intimate with the slide out mechanism! Spent the next two hours rewiring the antenna.

Went for a walk this afternoon to the lake. Took along some old bread to feed the resident coots. Found plenty of coots, but every time we threw out the bread, they flew away! At least the fish were thankful for the extra food.

After all, it is Saturday so a lazy(ier) day was in order. The cooler weather continues, so I took advantage and washed a bit more of the trailer. Another 5 days and I should have it finished…. no sense in rushing these things.

Lyn’s computer went on a go slow, so spent some time speeding it up, then off for a bike ride around the local sub-divisions.

Finally tried my hand at some baking, every time  I go back to the UK mum makes bread pudding for me, I got the recipe many years ago in the hope that Lyn would make one…… I am still waiting. Anyway, apart from a slightly burnt base, not sure if that was due to the small oven or my inability to select the correct temperature, it tasted OK, not as good as Mums but OK

Thankfully the hot and humid spell broke last night. It fell to around 13C overnight and reached around 24C today with a much lower humidity.

Today we took off to St Simons Island, which is about 10 miles away on the coastal side of Brunswick. Unlike Jekyll. Is this one was “Free” It is obviously a place for those with money, large well kept houses and property in many areas and an airport full of expensive toys, Gulfstream IV and V’s citations etc. No control tower though, wonder if I could start one up and charge a reasonable rate for my services??

As I mentioned earlier there is the Georgia – Florida football match this weekend, which is accompanied by the “Worlds Largest Open Air Cocktail Party”, which coincides with the Fall break at Georgia U. We went for a quiet wander down the beach, only to find hundreds of students and their associated beer coolers already entrenched on the beach. Now we know why there was a large police presence as we entered the parking lot! On entering the beach the coolers were inspected by the police, not as  I originally thought for booze, but to ensure there were no glass containers. The police were also handing out garbage bags to encourage the students to clean up themselves. The students and police seemed to get on very well.

We then went in search of a quilt shop that Lyn had read about on the web, unfortunately we found it. On the plus side the store was only about 50m from the runway at the airport.

One thing that has surprised me about the blog is how many hits it gets, around 50 per day. Only about 15 people were given the address of the site, so I guess it must be on some search engines, not an issue, just an observation.

That title probably caught your attention. Well, yesterday afternoon Lyn was ironing some of her quilting fabrics with the A/C on and lo and behold the power went out. We only have a 30A circuit to the trailer and the breaker popped.Reset the breaker and all was well.Actually all wasn’t well, we went to watch the recording of Coronation Street last night and it wasn’t there!! Seems the Satellite box gets a little temperamental when the power goes out.

Today was another hot and humid day, it seems that this is unusual weather and in fact a new high for this day was set. We did some local grocery shopping this morning, the size of the fridge / freezer requires a couple of trips to the store each week. After lunch we went off to the pool for a swim (the pool has warmed up considerably since our first visit) then back to the A/C. Later this afternoon a couple of heavy showers went through, and the temperature dropped from 30 to 23 over a couple of hours. Hopefully we can now open the place up and get some fresh air inside

Another hot and humid day, seems this is their equivalent of an Indian summer. Tomorrow has thundershowers in the forecast followed by a drop in the temperature to about 21C.

The place is beginning to fill up, 1 ON and 3 QC rigs arrived today. This weekend there is a college football game of some notoriety taking place, and some ardent supporters have arrived complete with a potful of decorations including windsocks, windmills, blowup mascots, lights etc. The game is between Florida and Georgia and has been going since 1903…. seems they get quite passionate about it.