Catching Up

Being a fulltimer (we live in our RV) we have a lifestyle of freedom that most can only dream of.  We volunteer for various national and state parks, picking them based on where we want to be for a winter or summer.  Every place we visit gives us new things to do and learn but each place also has its challenges.  Two national parks we volunteered for required a four hour, one way drive to get groceries.  Of course basic supplies were closer but very expensive - at least $4 for a half gallon of milk.  Fresh foods were equally expensive, when available, and were not in that great of shape.  So we evolved into once a month shopping trips and had to develop a way to store and preserve large quantities of supplies.  Luckily, the parks helped their volunteers with this and provided residential refrigerators and chest freezers.  The same was true with basic needs such as water and power, although not always plentiful or reliable.  It was just another part of the adventure that kept you on your toes and developing strategies to accommodate the situation.

Being nomadic and spending great amounts of time in remote regions of the country raises the difficulty level for maintaining communications, especially through the internet.  We managed fairly well our first two years on the road but this past year we have been landing in places that our only option for internet access has been through our Verizon Jetpack.  This method of connecting to the internet is limited and expensive.  Especially when in an area at the limit of a cell tower's capability to reach.  This has been our situation since arriving on St. Simons Island, GA in October of 2014 and then Chattahoochee Bend State Park in April of 2015, where we will remain through the spring of 2016.  Our cell phones and jetpack struggle to make a connection, frequently switching between two distant towers and dropping connections in the process.  On a good day with a steady connection we still may only get a data transmission rate of between one and two MB/s.  It's an okay rate but a small fraction of what one expects from a wired connection which runs around 100 MB/s.  We're not streaming any movies or watching cat videos on YouTube.  Not that we could anyway.  Our data is limited to 16 GB/month and it goes fast supporting our phones, two iPads, two Kindles and two computers.  The routine software and app updates alone can consume the whole data plan without ever opening a web page.  We have all our automatic update systems turned off and wait until we get to a WiFi connection, like at our daughter's.  It's quite the production when we make the hour and fifteen minute drive to see the grandbaby.  We carry out bags full of electronics, power supplies, multi-outlet surge protectors and extension cords.  Still, the data goes fast and we prioritize the things we do.  This blog has been low on the priority list and hence the infrequent and large gaps between postings.

The post before this one was uploaded in mid-January, it was about a day-trip we did in September.  I have spent the past year trying to get our adventures caught up and near real-time.  But instead the gap is getting worse.  We have arrived at the end of this billing cycle with a little data left in the bank and I am going to use it to do a "compressed" posting.  It will be abbreviated but it is covering from September 2015 to January 2016.

SEPTEMBER

Things at Chattahoochee Bend State Park have been pretty docile compared to our experiences in the Grand Canyon and Big Bend.  There had been virtually no drama since we arrived in April, but now in late September there is a little something worth writing about.

This park has two major campgrounds that have in-park campground hosts.  Cyndee and I are the hosts for the RV campground and the other host cares for the tent-only campground.  The tent campground host's duty had just ended days before and now Cyndee and I are caretakers for both campgrounds, filling the interim between the next host's arrival.  As luck would have it, the heat has broken and campers have turned out to enjoy weather that is just a little bit better than a sauna.

There were two campers in particular, actually one of them was a group of 32 sorority girls from the University of West Georgia that livened things up a little.  The other was a single guy, and he was seriously strange.  The first clue was that he had magnetic signs on the door of his vehicle that said "His Name for President", and he was not joking.  He seriously thought he was running for president.

There were other things he was doing that was raising warning flags but they were mostly just obnoxious, until that is, a round through the campground at about mid-morning.  Just as I was getting near the bathhouse a group of about eight sorority girls approached me and were obviously perturbed.

They told me that the guy had been talking loudly to himself and hollering in their direction saying; "Are you talking about me?  I know you're talking about me!".  But that wasn't the worst of it, in just the last few minutes he had walked up to their morning meeting and with all 32 of them standing there made a vulgar proposition.

Long story short, appropriate authorities were involved and this strange fellow was getting a three-sheriff escort out of the park, forbidden from ever returning.

The strange guy in shorts, the sorority girls in the background.
Park manager standing at a safe distance monitoring his progress vacating the premises.

OCTOBER

The holiday season is upon us.  Not only does this park not mind if we decorate for the holidays, they encourage it!

The hay bales were left over from a park function, everything else we acquired.
We'll leave the little scarecrows in the shed for whoever is here next year.

Another road trip, this time to Senoia (sah-noy-ya), home of the filming location for the massively popular TV series The Walking Dead.

Senoia is also home base to the Zac Brown Band.  Zac also has an operation just outside of town called Camp Southern Ground.  It's a large facility in the woods, a camp for kids of all abilities and has boys and girls living pavilions, an amphitheater, aquatics center and organic farm.

In Senoia there is the Southern Ground Social Club, a restaurant on one side and a bar on the other.  Our adventure in dining for the day was Southern Ground and it was a great adventure.  We would recommend this one to everyone.

Southern Ground restaurant is the store front with all the red.

 October saw the departure of the dozens of hummingbirds that visited our feeders daily as well as the songbirds at our seed feeders.  But in their place were some of the most gruesome orb weaver spiders I have ever seen.

These guys have lots of "texture" to them and they are quite aggressive.
They don't tolerate you touching their web, they will come after you.

While the spiders are wicked-scary looking, their webs are amazing.

 Not all birds left here to go to Mexico for the winter, an annual winter resident returned, a Bald Eagle.

Just cruising the Chattahoochee River.

I snagged this shot of the park's Bald Eagle as it was gliding over the boat launching ramp.  I've been stalking him/her ever since but have yet to catch it out of its nest which is high in a tree on the edge of the park property line.

We also had a falconry club do a public demonstration in October.  In addition to falcons, they brought hawks, vulchers and owls

NOVEMBER

And the rain just keeps coming.  It was a rainy spring and it was a rainy summer.  Everything is wet and the ground is saturated.  Then the rain took it up a notch in November and there was water just everywhere.  As much capacity as the Chattahoochee has, it finally succumbed to days and days of rain the first week of November.

More than half of the park's boat ramp is submerged

Normally, the river is not even visible from this position.  Before this day was over it submerged the swing.

The water eventually over-topped the ramp and flooded the day use area.

The river trail is in there somewhere, under six feet of water.
These trails have remained flooded, and closed into January and the river is rising again as I write (Jan 20, 2016)

Local residents looking for dry ground.  This is at the intersection to RV campground.

The Thanksgiving holiday saw the RV campground at near capacity.  Even all the rain didn't seem to put people off.  They showed up and made the best of the dry moments.

DECEMBER

Time to change the decorations.

Pumpkins and scarecrows replaced by Christmas Tree and a hapless reindeer tangled in lights.

Even the shed got a little sparkle for the holiday.

Surprisingly, the RV campground stayed fairly busy in December.  We were extra busy doing our volunteer duties and all the holiday activities.  Since we were in the same general location as our kids this year there was lots of shopping and visits to the grandbaby leading up to the holiday.

The kids endured our wish to have a traditional South Texas Christmas dinner of hot tamales.  We ordered four dozen from the Texas Tamale Warehouse.  It was a "displaced Texan survival kit".  They came to us packed in dry ice.  All we had to do was fire up the steamer for the tamales, cook some black beans and put out some hot tamale sauce.  Cyndee went one step further and put together her awesome recipe for guacamole.  We loved it, not sure the kids would consider this a new tradition.