Today was a typical day for our RV life. We woke up and it was a bit windy but was projected to warm up by noon or so. After coffee and breakfast Connie worked awhile while Neil did some minor coach maintenance items…changed a dead bulbs, taped up the wires for the failed pendant light over our island (it will get replaced in early May when we’re at New Horizons), plotted our our route to our next destination on the GPS, and changed he batteries in our smoke and CO detectors (this gets done when Daylight Savings Time happens twice a year).

After that it was lunch and then we headed off to the  Goethe State Forest for a couple of hikes. First, though…Neil snapped a picture of the mini RV parked next to us…can you believe 2 people and a pretty big dog live in something this size? They aren’t full time but really like “camping” so this is just sort of a waterproof tent I guess.

We then headed off to our first hike which was at Buck Island Pond. Here’s a picture of the pond right after we started the hike.

Notice anything missing there…like maybe the pond. This whole area is (acording to the map and signs) the pond itself. Wait a minute though, here it is. This little wet spot maybe 20 feet square is all that remains.

Close to the “pond” here is the sum total of wildlife we were able to get a picture of today…a striped turtle.

Continuing on around on our 2 mile hike around the “pond” we happened across this area which is full of pitcher plants…can’t you see them???

Neither can we.

That was about it for the first hike…essentially a bust…so it was off to the second hike. We continued on the highway through the park, down the unpaved Cow Creek Road for about 5 miles and finally found the second of our hikes…a boardwalk out to the giant Cypress tree. This tree is about 9 feet in diameter, 150 feet or so tall, and over 900 years old (I guess they counted the candles on it’s birthday cake or somethin’).

Anyway, here’s a picture of the base of the tree and one with Connie and the boardwalk so you can get a sense of the size…it was really huge for a tree that wasn’t a Redwood or Giant Sequoia.

After that it was another 30 or so mile drive back to home, showers, then off to the Tiki bar for beer o’clock. While we were there Connie called Bryan to wish him happy birthday as he turns 29 today…here’s an action shot of her talking to him on the phone.

After a couple of beers…we’ve been drinking this really good brown ale from the Cigar City Brewing Company named Maduro this week…it’s got a lot of chocolate and espresso flavor and is really good; we’re going to see if we can pick up a case before we leave the area…we ran back to the house (all of 40 feet or so, I’ll take a picture tomorrow showing the rig and the Tiki bar proximity) for a dinner of steak, left over mashed taters from the other night, and dinner rolls then it was back to the Tiki for another beer and a couple of shots of the group inside having a good time.

The bar is about 22 or 24 feet square, has like 10 or 11 chairs around the bar and another dozen around the outer walls. It’s got walls made out of empty beer bottles, I’ll take a picture of those tomorrow as well. The group was playing some dice game called Ship, Captain, Crew…with quite complicated rules involving getting a 6, 5, and 4 in order then adding some other dice together…but if you’re a woman and have a pink bra on then the rules all change (or something like that, it was way too complicated for a novice to play). We did discover that the bar seats for the first visit today were occupied by all of the RV site occupiers in order so we drank to that.

Afterwards we came home and turned on TV to watch Holmes on Homes. We’ll have some ice cream later and then off to bed. Tomorrow it’s going to rain in the morning so we’re just planning on hanging around the house and working. Connie has some more fun stuff figured out for Wed then Thursday we’ll do a lot of the getting ready to move stuff. Our drive on Friday is almost 400 miles so we’re going to hitch up Thursday afternoon and take down all the outside stuff to get a quick getaway Friday morning…otherwise we’ll end up setting up in the dark once we get to Gulf State Park and that’s no fun at all.

Cyas.