Our Travel Blog

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

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.