Friday June 30th 2023

Last night there was a thin haze covering the moon. This morning it made the blue sky gray. The TV weather talkers reported that the smoke from the Canadian wildfires had reached northern Florida. Thankfully, the air quality issues hadn’t arrived since the smoke was remaining at high altitude. Even with the sun partially obscured the temperature was still in the low nineties.

Most of my day was spent getting used to my new vehicle. I loaded it up with about half the stuff I took out of the old one. There is probably more that needs to be loaded back in, but I’m going to try and eliminate some of the trash. Once it was loaded I took a drive. The first thing I need to remember is to put the key fob back in my pocket after I open the door. I won’t need it again until I get out of the car. Pushing a button while stepping on the brake to start the car is easy enough to remember, but for some reason pushing the button at the end of the trip to stop the car doesn’t seem natural. All of the blind spot indicators, lane departure warnings and other “advanced” safety devices are going to take some getting used to. Today was interesting and I don’t even have all of the systems turned on. Time to go back to reading the owners manual.

Traffic was very heavy today. I think most of it was associated with it being Friday on an extra long holiday weekend. Even the local roads in southern Georgia had heavy traffic. I had it in mind to stop along the river in St. Mary’s GA, but all of the convenient parking spaces were filled with cars and empty boat trailers. It looked like a lot of recreational fishermen were getting an early start on the weekend. The town had also started preparing for the holiday activities by erecting some temporary structures.

Around the campground today the opposite to what I expected took place. Instead of filling up a little more for the weekend, the park seemed to empty out. Many of the long term residents packed up their RVs and departed for the weekend or longer. They leave their big grills, rugs, potted plants and patio lights. Just the big RV and the people leave. The result is new sight lines open up across the park.