Fast Forwarding

My last posting to this blog was in October of 2017 and even then I only covered our exploits through June of that year.  It was a bit of a stretch to find something to write about.  I had already whined about how terrible people were in an urban camping area.  We just put in our 15.5 hours a day in the gatehouse, visited the kids on our days off and did routine chores and shopping that went along with living in a major metropolitan area.  Hard to find much to write about.  But here it is April of 2018 and there is finally inspiration to write again.

Our contract with the United States Army Corps of Engineers at Lake Allatoona concluded at the end of October.  From there we moved over to the volunteer group and joined nine other couples at the Volunteer Village on the north shore of the lake.

Pretty nice digs at the Volunteer Village on Lake Allatoona.

The winter was spent doing routine things like patrolling closed campgrounds doing half-days on the front desk at the project management office, collecting money from the honor vaults at boat ramps and such.  We also worked some special projects, one in particular was researching land deeds for the 1940's.  The work was not physically or mentally challenging but it was way better than dealing with the slice of public that made life miserable for us and everyone around them in the campground.

The weather was weird this winter.  We lived in the north Atlanta suburbs for almost 30 years and we never had a winter like this one.  We had a normal November, December.  January was a little bit of a see-saw but then February came along and we had weather more typical for May.  Just as we thought winter was done there was a rude awakening.  Winter returned with a vengeance and March was more like a severe January.  I've never gone through so much propane so fast.

The snow that we got made for a pretty picture.

But the snow was wet, sticky and heavy.  Thousands of trees were downed,
power was lost for days and roads blocked all over north Georgia.

This picture was about 24 hrs after the snowfall.  It is easy to see how thick the
blanket of  snow was by looking at the hood of my truck.

Eventually we got out of the severe weather but it stayed cold well beyond our departure for New Mexico near the end of March.  We have been knocking around north Georgia for the better part of three years now.  There were a few breaks where we took a month or so to go home to Texas to see family or to Kansas to get the rig worked on but we had stayed pretty close to Atlanta to be with our new and only grand daughter.  But this move to New Mexico is a test to see if we can stand to be away for an extended period.  Extended in this case means six months, give or take.

We've got a volunteer job at a National Wildlife Refuge in southeast New Mexico.  We'll be visitor center hosts for Bitter Lake NWR.