Our Travel Blog

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!

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!