Busy, New and old Friends, Summer?

Turtle in the sun

The last month has been a busy one for both of us. Good busy, not bad busy. We've been happily doing things that we enjoy, finding friendship, and enjoying the turn toward warmth we've seen in the past few days.

We're still on Jekyll Island for another 2-1/2 weeks. This is the longest we've stayed in one place since we began our life on the road, not counting stays at our own property. It seems like we've only been here a week or two.

Allen Newland out of the sand

Consuelo is winding down her slipper knitting classes. I've lost track of how many students she's had, but I'm guessing a dozen or more. When she realized how long it typically took the average knitter to complete a pair of slippers (three weeks), she realized she would have to stop accepting students long before we leave here, in order to finish everything. Some were disappointed, but that just points to the continuing interest people in our community have in trying new things to satisfy their creative needs. A few knitters could not get through one pair. Others have ordered yarn for four or five pairs.

One of the Jekyll water towers

My project of fixing the wifi in the campground has been completely successful. Initially, I worked with the IT specialist on the island to load-balance the Cisco router. Once he gained confidence in my ability to troubleshoot and program the system, he turned it over to me to proceed. The main problem was not with the router, but rather with the configuration on the wifi access points. I've received many compliments for getting this running. The system is now up against the limited bandwidth of the DSL lines, instead of folks being unable to connect at all. Everybody gets a little bandwidth now, enough for email and limited web browsing. Typically 30-40 people are connected at any given time.

Consuelo and Mary Jo

The campground has turned from a retirement community to a family campground. The weather warmed into the 80s this week, just in time for school vacations, and all the little camp spaces that were empty all winter are now full of van campers, tents, and little RVs. The average age of a bike rider has dropped by 30 years.

I got to know one little boy who was camped behind our RV with his dad. Adam is 6, the precocious kind of kid who wants everything to be the biggest, fastest, smartest in his life. The three of us walked around the campground looking at the RVs, he showed me his Pokemon cards, and one day I came home and found his feet sticking out under our doorway. He had crawled under our motorhome to pet Thumper. When he came out, he looked like he had eaten a box of chocolate ice cream, with all the dirt on his face.

Ron Anderson ready to tee off

Consuelo and I both have entries in the Jekyll Island Arts Festival. She entered slippers in the fiber arts competition, and I entered 3 of my photos. She also knitted a dozen pairs of slippers to sell in the arts store associated with the festival.

I also produced a 5 minute DVD on Jekyll Island Winter, which a number of people have paid me for. I'm also working on 2010 Jekyll Calendars which have been requested by other campers.

As we wind things down, Consuelo is now sewing a dress for Amelia's birthday next week. I'm playing more golf.

All this activity has spawned a whole new collection of friends and acquaintances from all over the US and Canada. Some we'll probably track down in our travels. Others we'll look forward to seeing again back here on Jekyll in a couple years.

Art and Sharon Bonertz

A plus for us, we've had some old friends here in the park with us for a month each. Wayne and Mary Jo Lohrmann were here in February, and Art and Sharon Bonertz from Alberta arrived March 1st. They make us laugh, a rare and welcome commodity in the current state of financial affairs. In fact, we nearly got thrown out of the campground for laughing a few years ago. We're not quite so silly this time, but then again, we're camped farther away from the campground host!