Sunday January 7th 2024

I woke this morning to the sound of rain on the roof. The forecast had indicated a chance of light rain, but his was heavy rain. The rain was shorter in duration than Saturday’s rain, but seemed to be more intense. There was more standing water after this storm than yesterday’s as well. Once the sky cleared the sun brought the temperature into the upper sixties.

The morning rain resulted in a slow start to the day. Breakfast was slow and deliberate as I watched the morning news conference shows on TV. Following breakfast, I fired up my computer and backed up the last year of photos and blog entries. I do periodic backups throughout the year, but in January I make a couple of USB “thumb” drives with all of the years photos and blog text. One USB drive stays in my RV home and the other travels in my car. That isn’t the most distant offsite storage, but it is better than nothing. I also have online cloud backup for specific valuable files. My internet bandwidth isn’t good enough to rely exclusively on cloud backups. I took around ten thousand photos last year. That amounted to a little more than 60GB of storage.

The campground didn’t empty out the way I expected today. School resumes tomorrow after the winter break, so I expected most of the families with kids to depart. As least one big group of six sites with related groups all staying in tents didn’t leave today. They did have to dry out a lot of bedding and other material after the second day of morning rain. In other areas of the campground there were empty sites late this afternoon, but they may have filled up later in the evening.

On my walk today the number of people along the trail was up a little from yesterday. Most of the people seemed to be walking dogs. My observation that dogs don’t like to meet other dogs on the narrow boardwalk was reaffirmed today. The confined space and wire fence sides of the boardwalks seem to put the dogs on edge. Maybe they think its their crates that are being invaded by another dog. For whatever reason dogs that pass on the open trail without issue seem to react when meeting other dogs on the boardwalks. Of course it could just be the people at the other end of the dog leash.

It was warm and sunny enough today that I saw two alligators out of the water taking the sun on the far bank. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen both gators before in the same openings in vegetation along the bank. The Great Blue Heron I took pictures of today was in a new location along the bank, but was probably the same bird I’ve seen at an area further up river. Does the fact that I’m recognizing the specific animals mean I’ve been here too long?