Thursday July 6th 2023

After putting almost 1200 miles on my new car over the last few days, it is time to resume my daily blog. On Sunday I drove a little over five hundred miles from Jacksonville Florida into North Carolina to attend a family gathering over the holiday. The drive north took around seven and a half hours. Traffic was fairly light most of the way. I didn’t have any slow downs or delays along the way. It was an easy drive mostly on Interstate 95.

Yesterday I returned to Jacksonville. The return trip took a few minutes over eight hours. Traffic along most of the route was heavy. The big trucks that had been absent from the road on Sunday were a constant obstacle on Wednesday. The speed of travel was still quick, but it took more concentration. It wasn’t a pleasant drive. I arrived back at my RV home shortly before 4PM ready for a good rest.

I used most of the fancy new features in my new vehicle. I was able to listen to podcasts via my smart phone with Android Auto in the car. The Sirius XM radio got a good exercise as well. For driving, all of the new safety features like blind spot monitoring and lane change alert got a good test. Some of the features are going to take some driver training.

This morning I walked around the RV park and found a few changes over the three days I was gone. First a couple of my neighbors were gone. There is a whole area of open sites between my site and the front of the park now. I suspect there will be new occupants as time goes by. Perhaps because of the open sites, or more likely because of random roaming, the Canadian Geese have moved from the retention pond at the back of the park to the bigger pond at the front of the park. Walking now becomes an exercise of avoiding their cylindrical green calling cards on the grass, campsite pads and roads.

I only managed to get one walk in today. The afternoon thunderstorms kept me inside. Even when it wasn’t raining late this afternoon, there was plenty of lightening in the area, so I played it safe and stayed inside. The storms did managed to drop the temperatures a bit though.