Friday, March 14, 2014

Inverness


We arrived in Inverness on Tuesday around 2:30.    Paul and Helen are the wonderful hosts and have made us feel very welcome and comfortable.    

This is Paul & Helen's blog.    http://ptempesta.blogspot.com/



It is lovely here, their home is tucked into a couple of acres of woods.





It is a bit too nip out for the pool to be open, but you can bet your bippy I will be taking a dip in it when we return in October for another visit. 


Sally is very comfortable visiting with Paul & Helen.  



Whispering Pines Park





Paul is suffering from sciatica, so he didn't come with us on our walk through Whispering Pines on Thursday.  This is Gerry with our awesome hostess Helen.   



What on earth is this????!!!!!!   There were several of them throughout the park.









We went for a drive around Inverness.    I love this little section of road, where the oak trees create a canopy across the street.  When we go back for the parade on Saturday I will take more pictures of the town.     It is a quaint little town.    Elvis Presley did a movie here...but I will have to ask Helen which one again!  lol.   I have a great memory, it is just short.






Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Meet Sally the SunSeeker


We had a good bit of luck with Myrtle and Gene & Son's Insurance Company.  Around the 19th of December they made the decision that they accepted responsibility for the damage to Myrtle's engine.   They deemed her a write-off.     That was great news.   After 3 1/2 months of waiting not so patiently for the insurance company to settle up with us, we bought ourselves a 2003 SunSeeker.   




Meet Sally the SunSeeker.    
We picked her up on March 5th, and were on the road on March 8th.
  



Tentative route home, second choice.

I have to be home for a doctor's appointment by April 22nd, so we don't have time to get to Mexico and back.   We are off to Florida.      The first day we were on the road for 12 hours, the second day 8 hours.   Day 3 Gerry had a migraine, my back was staging a revolt and we were so exhausted we stayed another night at the Golden Isle Vacation Park campground in Brunswick Georgia.   

The winter has been crazy all over the U.S., so we are not sure what route to take home again.   If the weather stays cool in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, we will probably stay in Florida longer and  might make our way home via Willamsburg Virginia.  




Tentative route home, first choice.

If the weather cooperates, we will leave Florida by the second week of April and head to Biloxi and New Orleans for a couple of weeks on the way home.   

We really don't know what Florida has in store for us.   We have a plan to stop and visit  3 maybe 4 different folks.   Our first planned visit is with our friends Paul and Helen in Inverness.   We met the in Xpu Ha, Mayan Riviera, Mexica last winter.   They have already been back to Xpu Ha and home again this year.  We are pretty jazzed to see them later today.   They are a quick 3 1/2 hours from Brunswick, Georgia.  

Our second visit will be in Zephyhills will our long-time back home friends Sheila and Mark from Thorold, Ontario.   We had a short visit with their cat Scarf a month ago, and saw him off at the airport for the beginning of his international journeys.    He is spending some time in Florida, then heading home to Thorold for a short stop before jaunting across the ocean to London.   It will be nice to see him too.  

Our third visit will be with my cousins Eileen and Ken in Arcadia.    They are veteran snow birds.   Perhaps they will get me out on the golf course.....drat....I forgot my clubs!!!!!

The fourth visit is still in the planning stages.   Our granddaughter Zoe may or may not still be in Florida by the time we make our way down to Fort Myers.     










We reached North Carolina after about 10 hours of travelling.   It is only about a 9 hour drive, but the border was crazy busy at 7:00 a.m., and set us back an hour.



Here is where we went astray.   I must have been very tired when I chose this campground.   Not only was it an hour off the beaten track, it was closed for the winter.   This made our day a 12 hour day instead of a 10 hour one.   The good news is we were an hour further south than we had planned to be, so day two was only an 8 hour day.  :)   

We vowed we will never do another marathon drive.   If all goes well, and we don't end up leaving home during winter ever again, we won't have to.  


It was beautiful country nonetheless.   I hadn't seen anything worth taking pictures of before we left highway 77.




We saw a lot of deer, unfortunately I had the wrong lens on the camera and Gerry was not going to stop to let me get out to get some good pictures.  


South Carolina!   Finally no more snow anywhere and the grass is green, the trees are red and green.  







After sleeping like logs and nursing our aches and pains, we decided to take a walk around the campground.   This route said "Come walk on me", so we did.


For the first time since we started Turtling on Down the Road, we are not the trashiest camper in the campgrounds.   Myrtle would have fit in beautifully with a good many of the trailers and motorhomes here.


Although, Sally is not nearly the nicest motorhome in the campground either.




I grabbed the camera as is, and of course, it had the wrong lens on it.   We saw a lot of birds, mostly cardinals.





We didn't see this Heron until after we walked up and scared it off.   If you look closely, you can see it taking flight.


I love the moss on the trees.











This is not a road, it is a driveway.   There were a half a dozen homes along this road, all of them down driveways like this one, with a single mailbox at the road.   We couldn't quite make out the houses, but they were huge.   If you look very closely you can see it behind the trees at the end of this driveway.  


Around the corner, the houses were like this.


.


There are quite a few motorhomes and trailers in this campground that are permanent fixtures.  



Sally and Albert in there first campground together.    

After two days of driving, Sally is dirtier than Myrtle was after an entire winter in Mexico.  Wow!



Day four is upon us.   Gerry is migraine free this morning.   We are both still exhausted and my back is still not very happy, but we are going to hit the road.     We only have a 3 1/2 hour drive, so we will take our time packing up, and maybe stop at Jekyl Island on our way out of Georgia.  

Gerry noticed that Albert had a low tire as I started this blog.   Since then, he found a nail in it, pumped it up, drove over to a tire place, got the tire fixed, came back and hooked Albert back up.   Wow!  That was quick!