Back to Jekyll

Jekyll Bike Path

We're back on Jekyll Island for a week. Since the entire island is a state park, the local beauty is promoted and maintained. The residual beauty of the shores and the historic district are wonderful. We like those things.

Private homes, hotels, a water park, a little shopping center, golf courses, and of course a campground take up some space, but by law 65% of the land must remain undeveloped. A couple of the hotels are old and ready for replacement, and such decision are always controversial, and the controlling board decided one recently.

The campground offers monthly rates which we find favorable. Some campers thing the campground should be improved. The roads are dirt, and dusty when there's been no rain. There's no community room, so gatherings are difficult. The campground installed a large tent to serve this purpose, and it seems to work OK for potlucks and dinners, but other typical campground activities are thwarted. The Christmas dinner was held in a room at the golf course restaurant. The restrooms and showers are aging and impossible to look pristine, but we don't use them so it's no big deal for us.

What we do like is camping among the live oaks and yellow pines, with all the squirrels and birds flitting about. November is acorn season, and every now and then we hear a CLUNK-ponk-rattl-rattle as one bounces off our roof.

Entrance road

December is the season when Jekyll lights itself up for Christmas. This is the 3rd time we've been here in December, and in general, the lights seem more subdues this year. I like them better, especially in the historic district.

Last night, I spent a couple hours with my camera trying to capture the Christmas lights. I had intended to experiment with High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography, so I took my tripod anc captured several shots of each scene, each one with a different shutter speed. When I got home, I assembled each set of images in HDR software, but the results were less than pleasing. What you see here are just selected exposures from each set. Pretty nice, but neither spectacular nor unusual. But I like them.


Du Bignon Cottage

This cottage was one of the prettier ones, I though. Simply yet clearly lit, festooned with evergreens, it remined me of my New England Christmas roots. The building is one of the museum pieces that the Historic District has restored with period pieces and is open for tours.


The tree on the green and Goodyear Cottage

The green area was on that was much less flashy that I remeber from our visit in 2004. The live oaks had their arches all lit up along the main road, but there were no flashing wire sculpture lights to take away from the simple beauty of the cottages and their lights.


Jekyll Island Club Hotel

The hotel was once the clubhouse for the richa nad famous folks who had their winter homes here in the late 19th century. The Christmas lights offered a cheeriness which brightened the classic victorian style if the buildings.


Our pre-Christmas visit will end here tomorrow, when we leave for Naples and 10 days with Consuelo's family. Just before New Year's, we'll return here for 3 months. I'll have more pictures of the rest of the island then.

700 miles, 8 states, SN*W!

We're out of Maine, on our way south, and we're at the second night on the road. We got underway at 9:40 on Friday morning, December 5th, only 10 minutes behind our plan. We made a quick stop in Peabody, MA, so Consuelo could check the fit of a garment she's making for our daughter-in-law, Maria. While they did that, I took Thumper for a walk. After that, had soup and a sandwich and headed on down the road, landing in Southington, CT. We thought we could stay at the Wal-Mart there, but the signs said "NO RV OVERNIGHT PARKING", so we found another big empty parking lot at Bob's Furniture. Bob's people said "We don't own the lot, but it should be OK, as long as the cops don't kick you out." They didn't, in fact they parked in the lot with us for some of the night.

On the first day, we traversed Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, into Connecticut. Diesel is a bit more in New England, so we bought $75 in Massachusetts. That lasted into New York, where it was no cheaper, so we bought $100 worth there at around $3/gal.

We've spent over 4 years doing this RV thing, but we're discovering things that we've forgotten, or perhaps mis-remembered, about what we're supposed to do. For example, I found some bake-em-up crescent rolls and wanted to bake-em for breakfast on Saturday. I searched all over for a lighter or matches to light the pilot on the over, not finding any. Then I remembered that we have a convection-microwave oven, and we had the generator running to charge the batteries. 12 minutes later, we had nice warm crescent rolls.

We got onto the road about 8:30 this morning. It was about 18 degrees F when we left, and warmed a bit as we travelled. We crossed into New York, bought fuel, then went through Pennsylvania, a few miles of Maryland, a few more miles of West Virginia, and landed at a Flying J truck stop at the first exit in Virginia. We filled our LP tank so we could stay warm, and parked for the night at around 5:00 PM.

We have a history of Pennsylvania and treacherous weather. We had a couple trips from Rochester, MN, where we lived, to Western Massachusetts, where my family lived, travelling through PA on I81 and I80, facing snow and ice along the way. Today, we encountered snow flurries as we arrived in the Harrisburg area. Not enough to slow us down too much, We almost stopped in Harrisburg, but pressed on. At 6:00, the cashier at the Flying J reported that traffic was moving at 20 mph in the areas we had just come through, so we got by it just in time. More snow is in the forecast. We'll take it a day at a time, but we'd prefer to miss all of it.

Thumper finally seemed to realize at around 2:00 PM today that we weren't just out for an overnight trip, and that she had to resign herself that there would be no free runs anytime soon. My signal for this was when she gave up hoping that we'd park back at the Maine house, watching for the door to the motorhome to open onto the back lawn, and she climbed up on the sofa and went to sleep for the first time since we left.

It's 33 degrees here in northernmost Virginia. We are looking forward to cavorting on the beach in our shorts in Georgia in another week. OK, we'll settle for in a sweater. But MUCH, MUCH WARMER than 33 degrees!

Thanks... last one out, turn off the lights.

Thanksgiving Day

The final event for the Maine house was to host the kids and grand kids for Thanksgiving. The weather was OK, not perfect, and everybody reported having a good time. We cooked fairly traditionally, turkey on the grill, mashed potatoes, butternut squash. The kids had their own idea of food, and we had the alternates for them, like macaroni and fruit juice. They'll have whole new set of traditions when they grow up.

Amelia & Luna with the Clauses
On Friday, all the moms tripped to the stores to shop Black Friday. The results were mixed to disappointing, specific deals were sold out when they got there. While the moms were shopping, the dads took the kids to see Santa in Rockland, in the rain. Everyvbody except Amelia got on Sants's knee and tried hard to remeber everything they had thought about asking Santa for earlier in the day, but the excitement forced temporary amnesia.

We then travelled but a few miles out to the Transportation Museum in Owl's head, and the kids had a blast building styrofoam airplanes and flying them in a huge empty display hall. The Dad's had fun making airplanes, too, and Grandpa had fun looking around the museum.

On Saturday, we drove down to Pemaquid Point to see the lighthouse, frolic on the rocks, and look for shells. The ocean was a bit angry after the storms that passed through earlier in the week. After dinner on Saturday night everybody (except us) packed up and left for home.

Pemaquid Point Light

We're now left with collecting everything we'll need to take with us for the next 18 months as we cpend the winter in Georgia, travel to Alaska, then winter again in the Southwest US. Plus, we're leaving the house in a condition to be able to rent it next summer, which means packing all our personal stuff away in one bedroom. And finally, setting the house on low to survive the winter.

Consuelo and I have really enjoyed spending time in Maine. We're developing compassion for the local folks who scrape out a living up here, and suffering some of the same injustices that they do, like high fuel oil prices. And the locals are welcoming us to the community, like asking to use one of my photos on their community calendar.

We're almost ready to hit the road again. On to the next leg of travel around the US. We're excited about it.