As I noted in my last post…we arrived in Cedar Key at the Low Key Hideaway about 1400 or so Tuesday afternoon after the 200ish mile drive from Brunswick GA. Neither Mo or Frank were at the LKH and the Tiki Bar was not open yet…so Connie parked the car and walked out in the road to block traffic until Neil got pulled out across the road. Once he was out there…she ran around the back and was his mom-backer and he successfully got into site 3 straight in one go. After they consulted…he decided to move 3-4 feet to the left in the site to give us more patio space and put the awning out without hitting the tree space. This required pulling back out into the road pretty straight and backing up to get the trailer to the left, but the amount of fore and aft movement available necessitated doing the S-maneuver twice before he was where we wanted to be. Oh…you don’t know what a mom-backer is? He’s the guy riding on the back of the garbage truck down in the south and when the driver is reversing to pick up the dumpster the mom-backer stands back behind him and yells “Mom back, mom back.” Most southerners will recognize the caricature.

We brought on power and leveled…then Connie did the inside while Neil hooked up the remaining utilities and dumped and flushed our waste water tanks as we had transited the last couple of days with half full tanks that had vinegar and Dawn added to help get the gunk washed off the sides of the tanks from the sloshing…we’ll repeat that process when we leave here so they’re as clean as possible on arrival in North Fort Myers.

Tuesday

After arrival and setup…we went over to the Tiki Bar for Happy Hour and had a couple of brews. Came home, made some leftovers for dinner, watched TV, and crashed early as we were tired. Neil did get a couple of low tide sunset photos but they weren’t that great…hopefully we’ll get some better ones during our 10 days here.

I’m calling this one Osprey at Sunset…he/she was sitting on the dry oyster bed…looking for dinner I guess but the tide was pretty much at maximum low so there were just puddles in front of him. He is actually sitting on the long skinny sandbar left of the sun and below the island just inside the horizon in the above shot but Neil didn’t notice him until later on when the sun was almost gone behind the islands in the background.

We had declared Wednesday and Thursday to be rest days before starting our scheduled deep cleaning of the rig on Friday…and you’ll recognize a lot of “rinse and repeat in the rest of this post”. We consider this last stop at the LKH to be “vacation” from our travel season so that we arrive in North Fort Myers with a clean rig and enough energy to jump back into our routines down there…but with the way we’re feeling with the cold/flu/crud/whatever it is I hope we actually get the cleaning done.

Wednesday we sat outside in the shade, setup the grill, went to Happy Hour, and had some pan-seared halibut with dill sauce and some Caribbean curry rice to go along with it. Sunset was poop. Colds about the same…stuffy head and coughing for both Connie and Neil but there is some overall improvement so we’ll just hang in there. She is about 4 days behind him in the cycle since she caught it from him but it seems to have mostly hit him worse than her.

Thursday we again sat outside…are you starting to sense a pattern here…made some more roasted garlic in the oven that Neil hauled outside, went to Happy Hour, came home and grilled some bison steaks and fresh corn that we ate with the aforementioned roasted garlic (it was yummy) and some Mexican butter with cilantro pesto, hot sauce, chili powder, and lime juice in it. Both were excellent…then we did dishes and watched TV until bedtime. We had to give up and turn on the A/C units about 1400 in the afternoon as it was beastly hot. Colds about the same although again a little improvement.

Friday…we were supposed to start our cleaning today…but by unspoken agreement since we didn’t talk about it we put this off to another day…sat inside all day with the A/C units on before having Happy Hour and then some grilled chicken and leftover Caribbean curry to go with it. Ditto colds…still hanging on but continuing to improve ever so slowly. Sunset was nice.

Saturday Connie felt a little better so we started on doing the screens and inside of the windows…got about halfway done and Connie was tired so we stopped with about 60% of them done…Neil took the screens out and hosed the dust/bugs out of them while she vacuumed inside the screens and Windex-ed the glass. We went over to Happy Hour then had some seared Ahi tuna with rice and wasabi…then watched the Alabama-Arkansas game until halftime…41-0 and then went to bed. Final score was 48-7 with the backup quarterback playing the whole game as Tua sprained his ankle last week and is using the Arkansas game and the bye week to recover. They still slipped from #1 to #2 to LSU because LSU beat Auburn by 3…go figger that one. Nick Saban is happier not to be #1 anyway…gives him more things to motivate the team…he’s on record that polls are “rat poison”.

Sunday Connie felt poorly again…so we skipped cleaning and just went over to Mass…there’s a chapel on the island now so we no longer have to schlep the 24ish miles up to Chiefland…then we had Happy Hour and some carne asada pork with peppers and onions on corn tortillas for dinner. Sunset was pretty nice on Sunday. We had to sit not at the bar since all the weekend riff-raff was here…luckily they all left the next morning.

Noticed this license tag near where we were sitting.

Monday…rinse and repeat…finished the windows and fan blades/screens and cleaning in the bedroom and bathroom with the exception of the floor which we’ll do last and the dusting. Tried opening back up for fresh air…we had been closed since Saturday with the A/C running as it was hot/humid…but ended up closing again as it was hotter and more humid than we thought and was only going down to 78 over night. Happy Hour and a steak on the barbie was dinner and we used up a bunch of leftovers in the process. The leftover dill/onion dip sauce from the halibut last week went into the mashed taters along with a couple cloves of mashed garlic. The leftover onion/mushroom/cream sauce from the last week’s chicken and the leftover Mexican butter from the grilled corn last week got mixed with some white wine and tarragon which turned it into something resembling Bernaise sauce with a little more kick and got poured over the steak. Sunset was poop as it was cloudy.

Tuesday…dare I say it…rinse and repeat again. Finished up the dusting, fan cleaning, overhead hard drive area cleaning, sink scrubbing, and everything but the floors which we’ll do tomorrow…we originally thought we would have 2 more days after today but got more done than we figured on. Happy Hour and dinner which will be (this portion written before Happy Hour, dinner, and sunset) spaghetti with Italian sausage, mushroom and other goodies in a lemon wine sauce. Sunset TBD. Neil did get a photo of the Osprey with a Great Blue Heron in the background while we were cleaning…he noticed it out the window.

Sunset turned out to be acceptable…but we didn’t have the camera with us at sunset time so Neil took one with his iPhone. With the newly released iOS 10.3.3…Apple has enabled a computational photography technique they call Deep Fusion which is supposed to produce better output but it only works with the newest iPhone 11 models. Fortunately…he also has a camera app named Halide which takes RAW photos instead of the HEIC ones that the built in camera app does and uses the available API to extend the benefit to older models like his iPhone XS Max…I’ll have him take one with Halide Wednesday and see how it works…but here’s one he too Tuesday evening…not too shabby for a phone shot.

Wednesday we finished up our cleaning…then headed out to the Island Hotel Restaurant for a fancy dinner. Connie had an Island Hearts of Palm Salad…it was supposedly invented here…and some crab bisque while Neil had some loaded baked potato soup and some redfish picatta. All was good except the fish…the first half was excellent but the second half which happened to be the thick end of the filet was overdone and fishy. Neil thinks they put the pan half off the burner to keep the thinner end from over cooking which worked but they ended up overdoing the thicker portion of the filet so it was dry and fishy.

Here’s a shot of Connie’s salad…and yes…that is ice cream on top of it…I told ya it was a fancy place.

Neil spotted this in the mens room over the urinal.

When we got home…he went out and took a couple of those RAW format sunset shots with his iPhone…first one is straight out of the camera and the second was processed to look like it looked to the eye. They’re a little noisy compared to the DSLR shots he’s been taking and not quite as nice…but iPhone image quality is getting pretty close to what you get out of a DSLR these days.

Today’s our last day here…we’ll pack up the grill, chairs, and other outside stuff and head out tomorrow the last 250 miles of the travel season…over to I-75 and then south to North Fort Myers where Seminole Campground site 101 awaits us. I’ll get some more sunset photos tonight…well actually Neil will as I can’t get the camera up to my eye and my paws are too clumsy to focus and hit the shutter button…and report back in over the weekend.

Interesting stuff found on the net.

Can we just get this whole impeachment political maneuvering crap over already? The House is going to do what they’re going to do…and eventually they will vote to impeach despite the fact that it will cost them politically. Then the Senate will acquit the President since it takes a supermajority…67 votes if they all vote…to convict and convincing 20+ Republicans to vote to oust a President based on hearsay evidence isn’t going to happen. The President’s lawyers will say that his duty to uphold the laws of the country require him to ask foreign countries to investigate potential wrongdoings by American citizens and that the Constitution overrides the election law about soliciting foreign assistance…and the courts have never ruled on that question. Heck…at this point…it’s not clear that any actual crime was committed and the Constitution does say “high crimes and misdemeanors”. Apparently Ms. Pelosi has agreed to hold a vote today to approve some “rules” for conducting the hearings but the vote specifically does not authorize impeachment hearings…so whether what they’re doing is even legal is open to interpretation.

Can we get this whole Brexit thing over as well…either leave or stay but quit messing around with it. Now the Remainers…who lost the referendum on whether to leave or not…are demanding another referendum…sort of like the Democrats want to redo the 2016 election because Mrs. Clinton was supposed to win.

So on the
National Geographic site…there’s an article about this study in Nature that claims that previous science that Homo Sapiens (thats the species of modern human beings) developed simultaneously in numerous places around Africa is wrong. According to this study…which studied Mitochondrial DNA that is passed only from mothers to their offspring…anyway they studied this DNA from various ethnic groups around Africa…and they have “conclusively determined” that there was a single birthplace of our species in a small area in central Botswana. Further…according to this study it’s obvious that “every living human being” is descended from a single female that lived in that area of Botswana about 200,000 years ago.

Now that just defies logic. For every living human being to be descended from a single female would have to mean that she was the only fertile female in existence and that would have to mean that she was the only female in existence…in other words her name would have been Eve. The problem with that scientifically is that inbreeding from a single maternal source would have most likely cause the species to die out instead of continuing to exist…and the math probably doesn’t work anyway…it depends on which googled article you believe. 200,000 years is about 10,000 generations…so starting with 2 people back then there would only be about 2 billion people on earth today. That doesn’t count the ones that died or the fact that some generations had more than 2 children that survived…or the effect of inbreeding or potentially fatal genetic issues.

In the second place…there was another study a few years back that “conclusively determined” that all living human beings were descendants of a single male who lived 160,000 years ago in a completely different part of Africa. Since caveman probably never traveled more than 10 or so miles from their birth place…and since their lifespan was nowhere near 40,000 years…Adam lived in a completely different time and place than Eve.

So…both of these studies are pretty much BS…which is what the National Geographic article says.

Only older folk and Russians will likely get this one.

A friend sent me a whole bunch of military/police dog ones.

Bad ass of the week.

Cyas.