Tuesday August 25th 2020

The last few days have been humid, but the mostly cloudy sky kept things from feeling really hot and sticky. Today the clouds were gone. It was a typical Florida summer hot and humid day. As soon as I stepped out of my RV home it felt like I’d entered a sauna.

I had about three hours to prepare to get on the road this morning. I needed all of the time because of the heat. It really drains the energy out of you. I retreated back into the air conditioning inside my RV home on a regular basis. Once I got inside I stayed there longer than I probably should have. I left the park right at the 11AM checkout time.

Traffic on the sixty plus mile trip was heavy. I took the long way around Jacksonville on the west beltway. The route managed to eat a little of the extra time I had before a reasonable check in time at my destination. Even with that, I stopped at a rest area on Interstate 95 south of Jacksonville for about an hour, before finishing the last ten miles or so of my drive to St. Augustine.

I’m at the Stagecoach RV park outside St. Augustine for the next week. This is a park that I often stop at in this area. From the amount of online interaction I had with the park staff, I was expecting a no contact check in. I’ve experienced those at several parks on my journey east. Basically, they leave an envelop outside with your name on it after getting all the information and payment via phone or internet. That didn’t happen here. I had to either call them from the parking lot or go inside the office. I masked up and went inside.

Setup in the heat and humidity took away more of my energy. I’m going to sleep well tonight.

Monday August 24th 2020

Today was a more normal kind of rainy day for this area of the country. There were waves of heavy rain separated by a period of sunny sky. The humidity was over the top all day. A very tropical kind of day.

I got a couple of opportunities to walk around the campground during the breaks in the rain. The park really emptied out this morning. The last couple of weekenders and all of the overnight campers were gone by 9:30 this morning. I think they were trying to hit the road before the next wave of storms came through. The park is kind of empty tonight. There are fewer overnight residents than any of the nights since I arrived.

The rest of my day was spent inside my RV home. I got a little cleaning done and a few other chores out of the way during one of the rain storms. During others I was working on filling in a few more reservations between now and the end of the winter. I’ve got dates to fill in late February, March and April. The eleven month reservation window for the state parks fell in the early days of the pandemic when I was not focused on future travel. Now I have to find available private campgrounds to take the place of the state parks that are already booked. If the Canadian boarder remains closed, I will have less competition. Many Canadian snowbirds may be caught in the cold north this year.

Late this afternoon I started to prepare to move on tomorrow. It’s only a short drive to the St. Augustine FL area. I’ll leave here as close to the 11AM checkout as possible and probably wast time at a rest area or two along the way. It is only about a sixty mile drive.

Sunday August 23rd 2020

Today was the first real rainy day I’ve experienced in a long time. I’ve experienced rain over the last few months, but it wasn’t a real full day event. It was usually half a day often over night or a lot of clouds leading up to one big storm. Today’s rain started late yesterday and continued at varying intensities throughout the day. It wasn’t always heavy. Sometimes it was only mist or sprinkles. Basically, it was wet until late afternoon. The forecast calls for similar behavior over the next few days. It is a tropical event.

I spent all day around my RV home reading, doing travel research and watching TV in the bedroom. Yesterday wasn’t the best day for my main TV to quit, if any day would be. It was an interesting combination of listening from the other room and laying on the bed actually watching the TV. There was plenty of sports programming on TV including the delayed Indianapolis 500 to watch.

Late in the day, after the rain stopped, I got a little exercise walking around the park. It was largely an exercise in dodging puddles. There don’t seem to be as many overnight campers this evening. The weather may have delayed or changed travel plans.

Getting this blog entry written has been a challenge. Microsoft saw fit to update the Windows operating system on my computer last night. Besides all the additional time it took to boot, things weren’t behaving as expected. Right in the middle of resizing the picture to include in the blog the program paused for over five minutes with the message about loading new fonts. What Microsoft did to impact a third party product is a mystery and I have no idea what they updated or improved overall.

Saturday August 22nd 2020

It was an overcast day with the threat of rain. Big black clouds were on the horizon all day. Somehow the rain held off until evening. It has been raining since the sun started to slip below the horizon. Tomorrow is forecast to be a continuation of threatening rain storms.

The day began with a minor disaster. While I was eating breakfast with the TV on in the background, I heard a snap or mild pop from the TV that drew my attention. The screen on my 42 inch living room TV was blank, but the audio was still crystal clear. It didn’t take long to determine that my five year old TV had succumbed to one of the common problems with modern TVs. The back lighting had broken. If you shine a bright light at the screen, you can still see that it is producing a picture. You just can’t see it. I don’t think it is fixable under the replacement cost of the device.

When I have a two week stay near a city area, I’ll start to investigate in more detail. The first step will be to get the TV down off its mount. It looks pretty straight forward, but I’m not sure it is a standard mount. That may prove to be an issue if I have to replace the TV. Getting it securely mounted so it doesn’t fall off the wall while I’m gong down the road is a necessity. It will probably be the end of September or the beginning of October before I’m in the right place at the right time to dig into this new mess. In the mean time I’ll watch the TV in the bedroom or the one outside and do my research on repairs or replacements.

I drove into Historic St. Mary’s Georgia on the St Mary’s river this afternoon. The last time I was there, two years ago, the waterfront area was under construction. Today the new boat launch area and the road have been completed. There were a lot of people in the parks and walking around the town this afternoon. I joined them in the stroll around town mode. It was perhaps the most active I’ve seen the downtown area. The restaurants without door seating were busy. It didn’t look like the ones with indoor seating were as busy.

Friday August 21st 2020

Rain threatened all day, but never really got beyond a few sprinkles. Clouds dominated the sky most of the day to keep the high temperature in the mid eighties. The ever present humidity made it feel a little warmer.

This morning I stripped my Honda CR-V of the bicycle and the towing gear so I could run some errands. First on the list was grocery shopping. Without the bicycle on the back it is a whole lot easier to load and unload the groceries. About midday I made the trip to the local Walmart. This one had three employees at each entrance enforcing the mask requirement, social distancing and building capacity requirement. I have to say Walmart is consistent across the country enforcing its COVID-19 rules. Even in an area like this one, where the government doesn’t require masks, Walmart maintains its rules.

Some of the shelves were empty today. The canned vegetables section had a lot of empty packing boxes. This Walmart seems to have resorted to warehouse store style shelf stocking for simplicity and speed. The packing boxes are put on the shelves with the top cut off so the contents are visible. Today all that remained was the empty cardboard containers. The other stock shortage that impacted my shopping was the absence of milk in 2 quart containers. They had plenty of gallons, but in hot weather I don’t use a gallon before it spoils. I’ll have to make another grocery store excursion next week to get the things I missed today. Considering it was over two weeks since my last restocking, a week will seem odd.

The grocery shopping and a stop at the gas station to fill the tank took over two hours. I’m really not sure where the time went. Even when the store is busy I usually spend less than an hour. When I got back to the campground it was starting to fill up for the weekend. It will be interesting to see if tonight’s residents stay for the weekend or leave in the morning. I’ve been wrong with my guess at other campgrounds the last couple of weekends.

Thursday August 20th 2020

Today was a short travel day with a timing problem that often accompanies short trips. The amount of time between checkout and a reasonable check in time at the new location is greater than the time it takes to travel between the two places. In this case I had three hours to travel ninety miles.

To solve the issue I departed as close to checkout as I could. I was on the road at 10:50 just ten minutes before checkout. There is a major rest area about midway down Interstate 95 that I planned to stop at for an hour or more. As I approached the rest area I was greeted by signs indicating that the area was closed. I saw plenty of trucks in the parking lot so I stopped anyway. The car parking area and the rest area building were all closed and blocked off. There were plenty of trucks, RVs and quite a few passenger cars in the truck and trailer parking lot. Most of the cars had desperate people in need of a break. Many had pets to walk, but a few people got out of there cars and ran into the woods. People watching was a good way to spend an hour.

A few more miles along my route, I stopped for gas. It proved to be another time consumer. I waited behind a trailer to get to the pump in one of the RV lanes. The pump wasn’t the fastest in the world and I had to do two credit card passes to put in the sixty gallons of gas I needed.

I arrived at the Jacksonville North St Mary’s KOA in Kingsland Georgia about 2PM. This is a familiar stop. It is nice campground with many tall pines shading the sites right on the Florida Georgia line. The last time I stopped here was the spring of 2019 as I left Florida heading west. I’ll be here for five nights this time.

Wednesday August 19th 2020

After three days and about 720 miles of driving, today was a day of rest. I spent the day at the campground relaxing. The day started with a reasonable temperature in the seventies, but the humidity was in the oppressive range. I had to turn the AC on earlier than usual as the temperature climbed toward ninety. The expected line of thunderstorms late in the day dropped the temperature back into the high seventies with the humidity briefly under control.

I spent some time today wandering around the campground noting the things that have changed since my last visit in 2018. The most visible change are some new cabins and they are building a viewing deck patio like structure along the side of the pond. A more subtle difference is the same one I’ve seen elsewhere across the country this summer. They are not putting much if any attention into flower beds. They didn’t plant anything this year. Except for a few flowering bushes there is not any colorful plant life in the park. I think the resources that would have been used for the flower beds went to COVID issues.

One of the attractions at this campground is the bird life in the pond. I spent quite a few minutes along the side of the pond with my camera taking pictures of the various birds. I saw egrets, anhingas, and the resident swans. Most of the time the birds were in the middle of the lake or on the far side, so I had to use a lot of zoom for nice pictures. The last time I was here the swans and a few ducks were on the bank beside the campground.

Tomorrow I’m moving on to my next stop. I have about a ninety mile drive down Interstate 95 to the southern boarder of Georgia. My next stop is another regular stop in St Marys Georgia just before the Florida State Line. I’ll be there for a few days.

Tuesday August 18th 2020

With only 190 miles planned driving today, I slow rolled the travel prep tasks this morning. I pulled out of the Forsyth KOA at 11AM. The drive was uneventful.

My electronics worked today. I was able to listen to the rest of the audio book and the first couple of chapters over again since I didn’t have anything else ready to load. Before my next travel day on Thursday I’ll have to find another book or pod cast. I prefer to listen to someone talking than music. The quality of the talk goes directly to how quickly the long miles pass.

Along the drive southeast from Macon GA on Interstate 16, I saw more container trucks going both ways than than I’ve ever seen. I assumed they were coming from or heading for the Port of Savannah. When I got a chance to do a little googling, I learned that the Port of Savannah is “The single largest and fastest-growing container terminal in America.” It is nice to know I wasn’t imagining the large number of container trucks and that my deduction about the port in Savannah was on point.

There were a lot of dark clouds and a brief shower on today’s journey, but it didn’t prevent me from arriving at my destination shortly after 2PM. I’m at the Savannah South KOA in Richmond Hill Georgia for the next couple of nights. This isn’t my favorite KOA. The sites are close and some of the roads are narrow. I stop here because of the convenient location and all of the birds in the pond. In addition to hand raised swans there are native ibis, egrets and blue heron.

The black clouds and showers I passed through on my way to Savannah strengthened into a line severe thunderstorms. Throughout the late afternoon and evening there were warnings on the TV and the sky to the northwest got darker and darker. The threatened hail and strong winds never arrived. We got heavy rumbling thunder and lots of lightening all with a light long duration rain. I’m holed up inside my RV home with the air conditioner keeping everything cool.

Monday August 17th 2020

I was up early this morning to get started on my travel day. Crossing into the eastern time zone was going to steal an hour from my travel day and I had two cities to navigate. One was the medium sized city of Chattanooga and the other was the Mega Metropolis of Atlanta. I was on the road by 8:45AM. That was one of the only things that went according to plan.

The biggest annoyance of the day was my travel entertainment. My radio/CD player/Bluetooth speaker/navigation system was acting up again. Lately, it gets into a mode where it is continuously restarting. Power is probably dropping out to the unit causing it to restart, but it isn’t consistent so is hard to fix. Today was one of those days that it didn’t want to stay running. I stopped at the first rest area and tried to get it going without success. As I continued on my journey I let the unit keep trying to restart while I listened to every little squeak, screech, grind, bang and clank from the RV as the motorhome moved down the road. After about an hour the radio miraculously stayed on and started to play my audio book. It was fine for the rest of the journey.

The other big annoyance was a navigation error. To get from the north side of Atlanta to the south side there are three options. I could take Interstate 75 right through the middle or I could take the Interstate 285 beltway around the city. If it were a weekend day I’d probably take Interstate 75 through the middle of the city. On a weekday shortly after the lunch hour I thought it was prudent to take the beltway. Interstate 285 around the west side of the city works out to about 4 miles longer according to Google. The east side beltway is ten to fifteen miles longer. Approaching the intersection there were four lanes heading for the Interstate 285 beltway. I was in the far right lane assuming it would be the lane for the west side beltway. I didn’t really pay attention to the signs. For some strange reason of highway overpass design the two right lanes crossed over the two left lanes after they divided and I was headed on to the east side beltway. In a car I might tried to find an exit and reverse direction, but in the big RV it’s easier to just keep going.

After an annoying rain shower on the east side beltway I rejoined Interstate 75 south of Atlanta and continued on my way south. I arrived at my overnight stop in Forsyth Georgia at 2:30PM. The Forsyth KOA is a good location for an overnight stop just north of Macon Georgia that I’ve used before. Tomorrow my journey to the sea continues.

Sunday August 16th 2020

A strong line of thunderstorms passed by shortly before dawn. The sound of rain on the roof and thunder in the sky drowned out the sound of the air conditioner that was necessary to keep the temperature under control with all the windows closed. It was over by the time I got up shortly after 7AM.

My early start to the day was intended to help get on the road earlier than normal for my travel day to the east. I didn’t make my 9AM goal, but I was on the road 9:45AM. The first order of business was topping off my fuel tank with Arkansas cheaper gas. It only took seventeen gallons of gas in the nearly 80 gallon tank to fill the tank.

Interstate 40 through Memphis and the next 170 plus miles was an easy drive. Traffic wasn’t bad and the road was in good condition. The Interstate 840 outer belt south of Nashville was another story. The road has some serious bridge transition issues and a few unexplained dips where the road surface seems to have collapsed. My motorhome shocks got a real exercise. Two years ago I vowed not to take 840 around Nashville again. I broke that vow today because I was heading south out of Nashville on Interstate 24. After all, I rationalized, they had two years to fix the issues. Wrong again.

The only real traffic I encountered all day was on the section of Interstate 24 heading south from Nashville toward Chattanooga. There were many trucks surrounded by lots of cars. Once the road transitioned into two lanes it really got slow. Having to go around trucks going up hill in traffic can be a challenge in the big motorhome.

I pulled into the Manchester KOA in Manchester Tennessee for the night after 280 miles at 2:45PM. This is the first time in fifteen months my RV home has been parked east of the Mississippi. While I enjoy my time in the western states, I still identify as an easterner.