Travels with Gunther and Kara

Can’t really report much…or rather, any…Fun Stuff© this week except for grand baby Alex time…so just a quick catch up post today.

Wed May 9 we departed Savannah GA and with an overnight stop at Fayetteville RV in Wade NC just north of the city for an easy in/out pull through no unhitching required. We headed out to a local place Scrub Oak Grill and Pub for dinner…Neil had a cheese steak and Connie had a scallop salad along with a couple of pints. The food was OK but nothing to really rave about…but it was the only place close.

Next morning…Connie headed out really early about 0700 so that she could get to the Richmond area in time for the Mother/Grandmother Day thing at Alex’s pre-school…Neil followed her an hour or two later and parked in the check in area at Pocahontas State Park for 30 minutes or so as he made better time than he thought he would. Connie got there and we got quickly backed into our reserved site 109…and almost immediately found that the trees had grown and we had no satellite visibility…Neil even tried going to single satellite 101 as that’s really the only one you need but the dish wouldn’t lock on. We were supposed to be in 109 again in the fall…so that evening Neil called and got our reservation changed to 108 which does allow peeking past the trees for satellite visibility.

Dinner that night was leftovers…and we headed over to the human kids the next morning…and spent pretty much every day visiting the kids and Alex. Most of the time we went over there…and we took the kids out to the Japanese Steak House for dinner…unfortunately Yamato has gone way downhill since the last time we ate there 8 or 9 years ago…so we won’t be eating there again. Service was lousy, they did away with the show at the Teppanyaki Grill that the chefs used to do, and the whole experience and menu has been cheapened to the point that it’s not really worth the price anymore.

The next to last night here…the kids came over after Jen got off of work and we had pulled pork Neil made in the crockpot…it musta been good as there were no leftovers…then we had some carrot cake for later. Alex had a sleepover and after watching some cartoons and such…grandparents are s’posed to spoil them ya know…went down about 2000 for the night on his mattress up in the bedroom in the rig. Shortly after that we had a pretty good rainstorm and although it wasn’t too windy or hail-ey in the park there were about 32,000 power outages as a result…including the park. No worries for us…we turned off the A/C, opened the windows as it had cooled off but was pretty humid, and put the fans on for ventilation. Neil got up to recycle beer at 0239 and the power was back on by then…we had moved Alex’s mattress out to in front of the TV when we went to bed and he slept straight through until 0530.

After breakfast of English Muffins and coffee we headed over to the kids house as Alex had pre-school…after the we visited with Alex and Bryan until he headed off to work. Jen came home from school an hour or so later and after another hour or so visiting we said our “until next times”, invited Alex for another sleepover in October…5 months as he counted up on the calendar…and headed home. Dinner was leftovers from Yamato the other night.

Tomorrow we’re off on a 125 mile trip to northern VA…we’ll be in site 113 at Bull Run Regional Park again…there are only a few sites there that have satellite visibility so we always try to get 113 if it’s available. While in the area…we’ve got dental appointments (cleanings), a meeting with Nick our financial guy, an oil change for Big Red, and Neil’s birthday. Nothing else really planned although we might eat at our favorite sushi place one night if we feel like braving the traffic to get there.

Interesting things found on the net.

Well, we didn’t actually find this one on the net…here’s Alex and Jen.

In a lot of households…there’s an ongoing argument about which way the toilet paper should be installed on the roll…does it feed off the top or the bottom? Well…going back to the original patent application in 1891…there is a definitive answer. Clearly…the patent applicant never had a cat…because those damn things will just paw at it until the whole roll is on the floor.

Standards.

Truisms.

We’ve often been asked what retirement is like…we usually reply by saying we’re so busy that we wonder how we ever got by when we had to work too…then I saw this which perfectly illustrates our goal in life now…although for us it’s rum, draft craft beer, and merlot.

Damned autocorrect.

And finally…DumDum.

Cyas.

Well…the concert yesterday afternoon was excellent…Connie really enjoyed it as it was all Renaissance music mostly by Italian composers…Neil thought it was OK but at least he didn’t not like it. The concert lasted about an hour and then we headed off 10 or 12 miles southeast to a place called The Wyld Dock…it was right on the marsh and is a bar/seafood place.

Dinner was good…at least the food part was. Service was less than stellar and the overall ambiance was something less than we thought it would be…Connie had worn a dress and heels to the concert so we were way, way overdressed for this place…although we did see women in outfits with skirts they were mostly either sun dresses or bathing suit coverups. In addition…the noseeums were out so Connie got sort of ate on…Neil is pretty much immune to biting bugs as long as Connie is around…he calls her his ‘skeeter magnet since she has A blood and he has B hers is a lot sweeter than his.

We stayed long enough to have an order of scallop corn fritters and a bowl each of crab chowder…food was good. Connie had a Victoria Amber (a Mexican brew) and Neil a Suitcase…which was some concoction of Goslings rum, juice, bitters and nutmeg…it was too frou-frou and was basically a waste of perfectly good Goslings rum. Afterwards…we thought about another drink…but it was getting on to sunset and the bugs were getting worse so we headed home and drank our own beer.

Alexandillo tweeted a nice photo last night…that’s grand baby Alex’s twitter handle.

Connie looked so happy at the concert that Neil decided to take a picture of her.

Unfortunately…by the time he took the picture she opened her eyes and looked around and the above “what the heck are you doing” look is not the smiling, happy face she was displaying milliseconds before he snapped this shot.

She also took a shot of the view from The Wyld…the view was nice and they had a drive up dock for boaters who wanted to stop and have some eats or drinks.

Monday morning after breakfast we headed off for…you guessed it…more Fun Stuff©. Today’s adventure was a trip about 12 miles north into the southern portion of South Carolina to visit the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge…it had been reported to us that it was an outstanding place to visit. We stopped on the way to get some gas and more bug repellent…we were considering a mile hike around the pond after we did the 4 mile loop drive…but by the time we were done it was hot and we were hungry so we skipped the hike and headed home…grabbing a couple of cheeseburgers from the Golden Arches on the way back. While we were out…the lady that owns the campground called us…apologized profusely for the noise last Saturday night, and told us she credited one nights stay back to our credit card. There’s a barn on the property of Red Gate CG that’s used for weddings. Saturday night they had music going on until about 2230…it wasn’t that loud but when the party broke up there was a lot of whooping and hollering, engines being raced, and general debauchery going on…at least the way she told the story. We actually didn’t think it was too bad and by 2245 when we went to bed it had quieted down…would not have bothered Neil anyway as his auditory enablers get removed when he goes to bed. Still…the owner said that wasn’t the way they wanted to do business…apologized again and insisted on giving us 1 night credit back. We also asked her if we could break out the pressure washer long enough to wash the dead love bugs off the front of the rig…she said that was fine so after our burgers Neil went out and spent 20 minutes or so blasting them off.

Ok…let’s get on to the photos.

The first thing I can tell you is…the wildlife in southern SC is pretty much the same as the wildlife in SW FL…but then the climate and ecosystems are pretty much the same…Savannah is a relatively swampy area so there’s your normal complement of wading birds, water fowl, and gators. We weren’t all that impressed with seeing gators being as we’re from deep in the heart of gator country now…but the visitors we ran into from San Diego were mightily impressed with the…and you need to read this next part with that deep voice that the guy on Swamp People uses…”Massive Leviathans”.

The Savannah NWR is located just north of the Savannah River over on the SC side…and is in an area that…back in the day…was composed solely of rice plantations. The 4 mile loop drive basically goes along the top of some of the dikes that separated the rice paddies which have been allowed to go back to the nature wanted them to be.

As usual…all photos and plant life shots are Connie’s as Neil isn’t interested much in them. As we started off from the visitor center…Neil went ahead and mounted the bird lens on the camera and put his “normal walking around lens” 18-300mm lens on Connie’s camera instead of her usual wide angle to normal 18-55mm lens…that way she has a little more reach for things that are out a bit farther.

This Great Blue Heron had a fish for breakfast then promptly started looking for his second course.

Brown Headed Cowbird.

Breeding American Pipit…Connie identified this for us with Peterson’s as she’s got more patience than he does.

‘Chute him.

Red Wing Blackbird…this was a pretty outstanding pose for this species…normally all you can see of them is the next shot.

American Coots.

Dragonfly.

Great Egret.

Snowy Egret…only about 2/3 the height of the Great Egret above…and one of the shots that Connie was able to get using Neil’s longer lens than her short one. He’s offered to get her a longer range zoom…but she doesn’t want to carry that much weight.

View of the moss covered road down the dike.

Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay…wasting time.

Another Red Wing Blackbird sitting on a fence post.

With that our tour of the Savannah NWR was finished…although we did stop back by the visitor center to complete our second geocache. This one required gathering info from 4 different spots along the drive and from within the visitor center…the 4 digits recovered are the combination to the the lockbox containing the cache. We successfully completed that as well and logged the find.

I have to give mucho credit to Connie…she picked an excellent dinner recipe tonight. Sure…Neil cooked it but she found this chicken recipe with a honey/orange/hot pepper sauce that was really, really good…so good that we save the rest of the sauce for something else later. Had some noodles and Parmigiano-Reggiano to go along with it…it was outstanding.

Next up…Tuesday’s trip to the home of the Mighty 8th Air Force Museum…but it wasn’t actually an Air Force at the time…it’s official name was the VIII Bomber Command and it was responsible for the bombing campaign targeted against German forces in Europe during WW-II. VIII Bomber Command was established in January 1942 in Savannah GA…hence the museum is located here. It deployed aircraft to England through the spring and summer and initiated operations in August 1942, attacking the railroad marshaling yards in Rouen-Sotteville France.. Early missions suffered heavy losses as the Luftwaffe was more experienced at the time and training was limited before operations began. Experience quickly overcome the early losses and by the end of the war the unit was sending missions up up to 1,000 bombers escorted by 800 fighters. Forces of this command were principally responsible for the destruction of German military equipment factories, oil industry facilities, air bases, and transportation.

Restored B-17 “City of Savannah”…the B-17 Flying Fortress was one of two bombers operated by the command capable of a maximum payload of 6,000 pounds of bombs although this was usually restricted to 4,000 at the ranges required for targets in Nazi controlled areas. The other was the B-24 Liberator which was built Consolidated Aircraft…the company known today as General Dynamics. The B-24 was faster and had an 8,000 pound payload which was restricted to 6,000 pounds at the mission ranges required but the B-17 was a far tougher aircraft to attack and shoot down due to more defensive armament and a much tougher airframe…hence it’s name Flying Fortress. These bomb loads were large for the time but by the of the war the B-29 (which dropped the atomic bombs on Japan) had increased the payload to 16,000 pounds. Contrast this with current bombers…the F/A-18 single seat fighter bomber has a payload of 13,700 pounds and the B-52 bomber payload is around 70,000 pounds. A B-52 pilot Neil talked to in the officers club back in the day told him that with 1000 pound bombs the aircraft ran out of places to hang them before it ran out of payload. 

The belly turret on the B-17…it’s operator was lucky as he could enter the turret from inside the aircraft…the tail turret required the gunner to enter it from his own exterior hatch before takeoff…with essentially no real access to the tail turret from inside the remainder of the aircraft.

Scale model of a B-24 Liberator.

Restored Boeing-Stearman Model 75 Kaydet training aircraft.

As I said up above…the B-17 was pretty hard to bring down. This photo…sorry it’s a lousy image but it’s a photo of a photo…shows a B-17 that successfully returned to base after having it’s nose shot off over Germany…take a look at the shots of the whole plane above and you can see that the antiaircraft flak shell blew off everything forward of the cockpit…killing the bombardier who sits in the clear plexiglass nose…although the shell didn’t break anything vital and the aircraft remained flying for 3 or 4 hours to return to it’s base.

Open bomb bay doors on the B-17.

Vietnam era F-4C Phantom…the workhorse of the air war there in both fighter and bomber roles…and proof positive that if you put large enough engines on it you can make a brick fly…it’s the world’s faster converter of high quality jet fuel to black smoke. This is the same kind of aircraft that resulted in Neil’s meeting the mayor of Auburn AL back during his NROTC tour at Auburn University…I’ll put the long version of the story in the blog on another day when I don’t have much to say…but long story short he got a couple of these to do a flyover for a commissioning ceremony at the ROTC programs. Turns out that Auburn AL has some rules about aircraft over city limits…500 foot minimum altitude, no afterburners, and no supersonic speeds…unfortunately (and unbeknownst to him) the weekend warrior pilots who flew the flyover violated each of these. The participants and attendees of the commissioning ceremony were duly and mightily impressed…the mayor not so much…hence Neil getting invited to her office to ‘splain himself as he was responsible for them being there.

Soviet MIG-17…a Korean era daylight only fighter…which although developed didn’t see service during the war as production was concentrated on the MIG-15 instead. IT was still in use in the early part of the Vietnam War.

With that…our tour of the museum was done so we headed home via Walmart to pick up some groceries. Not sure if we’re eating in or going out tonight…it’s still under what we call “dynamic observation” at this point. Tomorrow we’re heading off northwards…an overnight stop near Fayetteville NC before arriving in the Richmond VA area to see grand baby Alex on Thursday…we’ll stay again at Pocahontas State Park while we’re there for 6 nights before continuing on up to the Fairfax VA area for a few days.

Interesting things found on the net.

I wonder what happened to the first one?

That’s dark…note the portrait of Dad on the wall..

Couple of interesting RVs.

Cyas.

Saturday was another day for Fun Stuff©. After coffee and some cottage cheese and blueberries that Connie made…we packed up and headed out about 0930 for our destination for the day…a hike at Skidaway Island State Park.

Skidaway Island State Park is…strangely enough…located on Skidaway Island…which is separated from the mainland by the Skidaway River. Now I’m not quite understanding how if it’s a river that makes it an island…but I took a gander at the map and I guess it all comes down to what you call a river, what you call an island, and the whole swampy coastline round the Savannah area. 

Farthest north is the Savannah River which flows inland along the GA/SC border…in fact it is the border…to the city of Savannah. South of the Savannah River there’s a whole passle of tributary rivers, creeks, channels, and such…and most of them act like regular rivers heading inland with sort of peninsula like parts of land between them…among these are the Ogeechee, Little Ogeechee, Vernon, and Wilmington Rivers. In between the Vernon and Wilmington rivers running basically parallel to the coast is a single piece of water that separates the mainland on the west from Skidaway Island to the east…this river is either the Skidaway or Moon Rivers or Shipyard Creek depending on which of the names on the map you choose to believe. But to be fair it does completely separate Skidaway Island from the mainland…but I digress too much into geographic minutia I believe.

Connie wanted me to tell ya ‘bout the frog incident…last Tuesday evening we discovered a stowaway…he was just a sitting there right in front of our fridge…one of the itty bitty tree frogs that we found a lot down in North Fort Myers…well, apparently he decided to head north for the summer and hitched a ride. Neil evicted him straightaway…put it out in the grass at Meera’s RV…thats as far north as he’s getting with us. He didn’t have a passport so we clearly needed to not be complicit in his illegal immigration to Canuckistan later on next month.

This morning we found out that one of the hard drives on our file server died…luckily Neil had ordered another couple to be delivered to the human kids house this week and his backup routines made sure that we didn’t lose any data. He’ll have to figure out how to get it replaced under warranty I guess.

Ok…on to Skidaway Island State Park. We got to the entrance and Connie went in to pay our $5 per car entry fee and it turned out that retired military only have to pay $3.75. She didn’t have her ID on her and offered to go out and have Neil come in but the lady at the desk took her word for it and we got ourselves parked. Our hike for the day was a combination of four trails…we started on the Sandpiper Trail Loop, switched over to the Avian Loop, then the Connector Trail and ended up on the Big Ferry Trail back to the parking lot…essentially a large clockwise loop of about 3 miles. It took us just under 1 hour and 7 minutes including our stops…it was a pretty flat and easy trail with boardwalks over portions that are submerged at high tide.

This turned out to be a pretty decent walk in the woods…but it was kinda minimal as wildlife sightings went…but you can only photograph what you see I guess.

First up were some Fiddler Crabs…a single one on a dry section of the salt marsh and a rumble of them a bit farther down the boardwalk in a wet section.

We spotted a female cardinal.

And passed through some old Confederate fortification trenches…these were originally setup to defend the island but were abandoned when their forces were about to be cut off by the Union Navy and the forces retreated to Fort Pulaski as I discussed the other day.

Passed some flowering prickly pears.

We stopped along the Skidaway River for a water break.

Connie heard and then spotted…and Neil re-spotted him when he flew to another tree…a Pileated Woodpecker…of Woody Woodpecker fame. Sorry ‘bout the not so great photo…but he flew away before Neil could get the bird lens out…but as I said you do the best you can.

At the observation tower…located about the 2 mile mark on the above map at the far north end of our loop…this dragonfly was sitting about 15 feet away on top of a tree.

And Connie got some general overview shots from the tower.

We met a couple of nice middle aged ladies on a walk with their dog at the observation tower before heading the last mile back to the car and heading home for lunch. Neil wanted to stop for a Margarita…it was Cinco de Mayo…but we decided to go have lunch instead. We completely ignored the Kentucky Derby later on in the afternoon and had Carne Asada Tacos for dinner

Sunday morning we headed off to Mass then afterwards Neil made an omelet out of leftover quesadilla from the other night at the pub and black beans and rice we had left over ourselves. This afternoon we’re off to an organ/voice recital at the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist…then off to dinner but I’ll report on that in my next missive.

Interesting things found on the net.

It finally happened.

Cyas.

I hope you people realize the troubles we go through on your account…it’s ridikilous as Sylvester the cat would say.

Today’s mission was to visit both the Tybee Island Lighthouse about 20 miles east of here right at the mouth of the Savannah River and then visit Fort Pulaski which is located on Cockspur Island…the latter is located just north of Tybee Island in the middle of the river.

Anyways…the troubles were due to having to get up in the middle of the doggoned night to start…we wanted to be over at the lighthouse at sunrise to get the best light for this shot…well, Neil wanted to be there for sunrise anyway, I can’t say that anybody else ‘round here was all that enthusiastic about it…but anyways that meant we had to leave the campground at 0530…which meant that the alarm went off at 0430. 

What’s up with these humans anyway…don’t they realize a bear needs his beauty sleep and if it’s dark then you’re s’posed to be asleep and not up wandering around the countryside?

Once Connie had made coffee in our go-cups…we packed up cameras, water, and all the usual paraphernalia and headed out…arriving at the lighthouse grounds just a couple minutes before sunrise…but instead of the golden sunrise-y light we hoped to see there were some clouds…but one deals with the hand you’re given so we quickly decided that moody lighthouse photos would be the order of the day.

Oh bother.

The current Tybee Island Light is the 4th tower located at the site…although the first two weren’t lit…so I guess you really can’t call them lighthouses. The first wooden one was built in 1736 and washed away in a storm in 1741. It was replaced by a stone and wood version the following year…and the second succumbed to shoreline erosion. The third was a brick tower 100 feet tall erected in 1773 with a candle lit light and retrofitted with oil lamps in 1790. The third tower was burned and the fresnel lens for the light removed to nearby Fort Pulaski in 1862 during the civil war. After the war was over construction of a new light started in 1866 and after several modifications reached it’s current height of 144 feet in the late 1880s. Automated in 1972 it still serves as a navigational aid for entering the Savannah River…but instead of having a rotating mirror behind the Fresnel lens to produce a periodic rotating beam it is a fixed always-on white light. The light is one of seven remaining colonial era lighthouses in the US.

OK…so what did we see.

Different views of Tybee Island Light to start with.

Connie grabbed this one with the moon in the background.

While Neil got a wider view from the same location at the same time

Afterwards we walked over to the beach and took a shot looking back west towards the light.

While Connie got this artsy-fartsy shot of the beach at sunrise with sea grass in the foreground.

Our second stop for the day was Fort Pulaski…so let’s talk about it a little.

It was named after Casimir Pulaski…the Polish officer who fought for the colonies during the Revolutionary War. After the city of Washington DC was burned by the British during the war of 1812…President Madison had a series of forts established along the eastern seaboard to protect our ports and cities from bombardment. Fort Pulaski on Cockspur Island just north of Tybee Island was one of these forts…it was actually designed, laid out, surveyed and had a portion of the construction supervised by a fellow you might have heard of…a young Army 2nd Lieutenant on his first assignment after graduating from West Point…by the name of Robert E. Lee. The fort was constructed of masonry with 7.something million bricks and was considered to be invulnerable…the only place it could be bombarded from was Tybee Island and at ranges of over a mile masonry forts were considered invulnerable to bombardment by smooth bore artillery firing round shot. In 1861…shortly before Georgia seceded from the Union…the governor ordered the lightly manned, almost undefended, and somewhat broken down fort to be seized for the state. With it’s artillery commanding both the wider north and narrow south passages of the Savannah River around Cockspur Island…it was ideal to protect the port of Savannah…and because of it’s range to Tybee Island the Confederates weren’t really worried about it being attacked. Around this same time…Tybee Island Light was burned and the Fresnel lens moved as I discussed earlier. The Confederates spent the next 15 months or so returning the fort to truly operational status and the Union commander at the time on Tybee Island Captain Quincy Gilmore believed that only an overwhelming bombardment would threaten the fort. He set up 11 batteries along the north shore of Tybee Island including mostly smooth bore artillery and mortars but also had 10 of the newly developed rifled Parrot and James rifles which…as it turned out…were the guns that caused the fort to surrender.

After rejection of a surrender demand by the Union forces…Union artillery opened fire early on April 10, 1862 and fired about 3,000 rounds against the southeast side of the fort. The mortars were ineffective as were the smoothbore artillery initially…but the rifled Parrot and James rifles had enough penetrating power to loosen the masonry and then followup impacts from the smoothbores finished knocking the loosened brickwork down. By the end of the day…the southeast wall of the fort had been breached.

Early the next morning the bombardment resumed and by early afternoon shells from Tybee Island were entering through the breached southeast wall and impacting the northwest wall from the inside…perilously close to the fort’s main magazine with 20 tons of black powder inside. Realizing that a single lucky shot would result in the destruction of the fort and the loss of all his men…and with most of the Confederate cannon out of action by this time…the fort was surrendered by Colonel Charles Olmstead.

The quick fall of the fort was the death knell of masonry fortifications as it…despite being considered one of the most strongest forts in the country…proved that masonry structures could not stand up to bombardment by high caliber rifled artillery. Interestingly enough…Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortuga Islands west of Key West Florida is of similar construction and was essentially abandoned as a defensive structure by the Union after the destruction of Fort Pulaski.

Ok…on to some photos from the fort.

The demilune in front of the fort’s main entrance. Deminlune is French for half moon and serves as a barrier to easy access for attackers to a fort’s main entrance. The entrance is behind and the entire fort is surrounded by a 7 foot deep moat. Of note…the main entrance of the fort has a drawbridge with inner and outer doors along the entrance sally port and musket slits for firing into invaders if they managed to cross the moat and breach the outer doors. Since it’s got both a moat and a drawbridge…it must be a castle, right?

One of the Confederate artillery along the top of the southeast wall…you can see it was struck during the bombardment and damaged.

A panoramic view looking south towards Tybee Island across the southern passage around Cockspur Island…the 36 Union artillery pieces were divided into 9 batteries essentially across the width of this shot…it’s just over a mile from the fort wall to the battery positions on Tybee.

Damage to the interior side of the northwest wall…this was caused by round shot that entered through the southeast wall behind the camera position after it was breached by the combination of James/Parrot rifle and smoothbore artillery. The northwest magazine is directly underneath these impact points and the Union actually had on shell detonate just inside the magazine access tunnel…but the turns and corners in the tunnel prevented it from getting into the magazine.

Two shots of the outside of the southeast wall with damage due to impacts. The breach point was just a round the corner you can see. Union forces repaired the damage after the fort was taken and remained in control of it until the end of the war. After the war the fort was used as a prison for a time before being abandoned and then eventually turned into a National Monument in 1924.

Actual casualties during the bombardment were almost nonexistent…the fort had 3 injured personnel and the single loss of life was a Union soldier at one of the batteries on Tybee Island.

With that our day’s Fun Stuff© was done. We were originally going to hike out to the eastern end of Cockspur Island to get some photos of the smaller Cockspur Island Lighthouse which marks the entrance to the south channel…but it was getting hot, we were tired, and the ‘skeeters were pretty fierce…so we packed it in, came home with a stop by Scuba Steve’s Fish Market to get some fresh grouper for dinner, and had a nap since we got up so early.

Interesting things found on the net.

It’s important to have accuracy on your tax returns…even in the UK.

Captain Crunch has been lyin’ to us all this time…he’s just a Commander.

Why people have trust issues.

And a couple of groaners for ya’.

Cyas.

We’re parked here in site 1 at Red Gate RV in Savannah GA as I type this missive…but I digress slightly…let me catch ya up with events since my last post ‘afore I get to the Fun Stuff©.

When last I posted…we had just over a week to go and about a dozen items left on the Pre-Underway Checklist. Neil and Connie…well, mostly him until the last day or so when she did the inside stuff…kept plugging away and by mid afternoon Sunday he had completed everything on the outside list except dumping and flushing our waste tanks which he left until Monday. Our level indicators…we have SeeLevel II systems installed which are a lot better than the float switch type as they have ultrasonic sensors outside the tank that see what the levels are…anyway they still get inaccurate after awhile as gunk gets stuck on the sides of the tank and it’s particularly worse after long periods of non-moving the rig. Our black tank indicator displayed about 17% when it was empty and after about 2 days read 92%…luckily we’re well aware that it takes about 16 or 17 days to actually fill the tank so we’ve just been dumping it about every 14 over the winter. We’ve also developed “toilet-whisperer” ears and you can tell by ear when it’s getting close to full. The gray tank was reading 0 when empty and progressed normally up to about 30% then went to 100…again luckily we’re aware that it’s about 4 days to fill with our normal water usage.  Neil’s flushed them a couple times over the winter but without any motion on the rig it just doesn’t do much.

The solution to the tank sensor issue is pretty easy…after he dumped and flushed so all the loose stuff was gone on Monday he filled both tanks to about 50% and then added 3 gallons of white vinegar and a couple of cups of Dawn degreaser dish detergent to each tank. The plan was to just let that slosh around on our first two travel days and then dump/flush when we arrived in Savannah.

We had dinner at the Elks…Broasted Chicken…which is a fancy term for fried in a pressure cooker…on Monday night and had enough left overs for another meal later…we originally planned this for Wednesday night but ended up changing our minds Tuesday afternoon. After dinner we passed along “until next time in the fall” to our Lodge friends and headed home.

We got up Tuesday morning and Neil wasn’t feeling too well…but we had to leave so he bored on we got hitched, said our “until next times” to friends at Seminole and hit the road. He felt pretty lousy all day and we arrived 228 miles later at Meera’s RV in Citra FL…it’s on US-301 between Ocala and Gainesville. We had our choice of sites…only 1 was filled by the campground owners. It wasn’t really much to write home about…but it was 30 yards from the highway and easy in/out so for an overnight stop it was perfect. We ended up having the leftover chicken mixed into some noodles as after he had some afternoon snack and rested he was feeling better but not great. They finally decided he was just having a bit o’ angst over starting travel again…he’s always worried that something will break the first couple of travel days.

Wednesday morning we hit the road and continued up US-301 to the intersection with I-10 west of Jacksonville…and instead of taking the under construction portion of I-10 and the Jacksonville I-295 beltway we continued on up 301…a beautiful 4 lane highway with practically no traffic…to the intersection with I-95 about 8 miles south of the FL/GA border then turned north towards Savannah.

As we approached Savannah about 1330…we spotted the overhead sign with a message…Neil called Connie on the radio and said “you don’t see that every day”. The sign said “State Road 21 Closed due to Plane Crash.” We had no real idea what had actually happened until later…it turned out that a C-130 belonging to the Puerto Rico National Guard had crashed on takeoff about 1130 killing all 9 souls on board…the airport is about 10 miles NE of Red Gate CG and the road closure is immediately to the east of the airport. At this point the cause of the accident is unknown but witnesses reported that it stalled and pan-caked into the median on the highway…news footage showed that only the tail section was still recognizable as part of an aircraft. Our sympathies go out to the lost souls and their families…the aircraft was taking off on it’s final flight out to Arizona to the Aircraft Boneyard as it was being retired…but aircraft age may or may not have actually had anything to do with the accident.

Neil was completely recovered from his earlier stomach troubles…so we headed out to the Tailgate Sports Bar and Grill for dinner…no drafts there but they did have about 100 bottled/canned beers. We sampled Left Hand Brewery Milk Stout, Dragons Milk Stout, Abita Amber, and Terrapin Golden Ale along with a plate of Southwest Egg Rolls and a Quesadilla for dinner before heading home. 

Neil got this shot of our site 1 at Red Gate CG…it’s actually a lot nicer than we thought it would be from looking at the satellite photos on google maps. Gravel pad with surrounding grass and plenty of space between sites. We’ll be here 7 days and have plenty o’ Fun Stuff© planned.

While Neil was in the head…actually known ‘round these parts as the “Used Beer Recycling Facility” or UBRF…and pronounced youburf…he noticed this over the deposit facility…he’s never actually seen a urinal flowmeter before but this particular one has processed 3,747,985 gallons of input since installation…he can confirm that it went up 1 gallon through his efforts.

Ok, on to Fun Stuff©. Today’s mission was to visit the Wormsloe Historic site, Jones Street and the Candler Oak so let’s get right to it.

In order to ‘splain the Wormsloe Historic Site…a little history is in order. As you may…or more likely may not…know, the colony of Georgia was founded in 1733 by a group of British Utopian folks and…amazingly enough…was founded with slavery being illegal as they thought that having slaves would cause the colonists to “become an entitled aristocratic landowner class rather than yeoman farmers” that the Utopians thought was preferable. One of the colonists was named Noble Jones…although he wasn’t a noble at all but rather a carpenter. By tradition back then…carpenters did their own surveying and because old Noble was one of the trusted confidants of the colony director James Oglethorpe he ended up with a whole series of unpaid tasks…surveyor, doctor, constable, captain of the militia. He continued to juggle these assigned tasks…performing none of them well as he was over-extended…for about 3 years when the colony organizers back in England sent out a representative to figure out why the colony wasn’t progressing as fast as the organizers wanted. Several of the other colonists complained that Noble hadn’t got around to surveying their land (each colonist was limited to 500 acres) and hence they weren’t able to grow anything. Despite Noble’s insistence that he was overloaded and underpaid…the rep reported back to the organizers that he was an “indolent man”…as a result he was fired from all of his positions. Not being too happy at being labeled a slacker due to no fault of his own…he determined to take up his 500 acres south of the city and show them he was as industrious as the next colonist.

He founded the estate of Wormsloe…which was originally called Wormslow after the region in Wales where Noble’s family came from in 1737 and today it is still inhabited…and farmed…by his descendants…making it the oldest continuously owned by a family estate in the state and one of the oldest in the entire country. In 1972 his dependents donated most of the estate to the Nature Conservancy which sold it to the state…leaving about 80 acres which are owned, farmed, and occupied by the descendants.

When you enter the Historic Site…which comprises the acreage owned by the state…you proceed down a dead straight 1.5 mile long driveway named Oak Road for the 400 live oaks planted along it’s sides. Here’s a shot taken from just inside the entrance arch…the white fence you can just barely make out in the distance across the road is about 2/3 of the distance down Oak Road.

It’s a really, really impressive driveway.

As requested by my baby sister MJ…here’s a slightly improved version of not the above shot but one taken at about the same time from the same place…I wanted to give it more of the golden hour early morning view than the one above. It’s not really better…or worse…than the originally processed shot…just a different feel. If we’re down that way earlier in the morning again before we leave I might stop by and get Neil to grab another shot for me to play with. Taking photos within an hour after sunrise or an hour before sunset is really the optimum timing…but unfortunately that requires a lot of early mornings. I actually like both of these…the overall lighting effect in the first is closer to reality but the color cast of the latter is a bit closer to reality as well…it really depends on what you like. Me…I’m a sucker for waterfalls (as you well know if you’ve been reading these missives for very long) as well as Golden Hour.

Are either of these really close to life as actually seen by our eyes? Depends on your point of view I guess…no camera can ever really capture the dynamic range and color range that eyes do…so almost every photo really needs some post processing in order to capture either “what the photographer say with his eyes” or “ what is the photographer trying to say with this image”. From an optically perfect perspective…the second one is too warm and yellow…but is really close to what your eyes would have seen if Neil had only been there a bit earlier in the day. Sadly though…he wasn’t…so I had to assist him a bit.

At the far end of the driveway we went into the museum, watched the movie and toured the exhibits…finding that there’s a geocache station inside the Visitor Center. We had decided to give the geocaching hobby a try this summer as it entails hiking to and finding various caches spread around the country…inside each there’s a log book you sign and some small trinkets which you can take one and leave one. Some of the trinkets have stories attached to them…for instance one might be in a cache in Savannah GA with a note that says “I need to get to cache #5487a which is located near Spokane WA. So if you’re proceeding in that direction…you take it along and deposit it in another cache…even if you only moved it 100 miles. The trinket eventually gets to it’s destination and the originator gets a report back on the travels of his object. It seems like a neat hobby and involves some sleuthing as once you get in the vicinity of the GPS coordinates of a particular cache you still need to actually find it.

In this particular cache’s case…it’s what is known as a 3 stage multi-cache and it’s serial number GC2RT02…it’s rated as difficulty 2 and terrain 1.5. The cache itself is locked with a 4 number combination lock…the multi part comes about as you must proceed to 3 locations around the historic site…amazingly enough they’re all on the hike to see the various sites and artifacts…so we headed out to find the info we needed…which you then plug into a math equation on the cache web page to get the combo for the lock.

First stop was the house and fort that Noble built to overlook and guard the Jones Narrows…which was back in the day the main shipping channel into the port at the city of Savannah.

The first piece of information we needed was the number of sally ports (i.e., musket openings) visible on the remaining walls of the ruin. You can see one of the ports on the corner piece at the far right hand side of the shot…it’s the hole about 18 inches square. The house and fort themselves were built of tabby…which is a sort of concrete made out of lime, sand, oyster shells, and water. I can’t reveal the exact number of sally ports as then you could go and plunder the cache without following the steps to all the multi stages.

Next up was the overlook at the Jones Narrows…as you can see it’s just a swamp now but the construction of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway in the 1960s and the Diamond Causeway to the south of Wormsloe after that reduced the water flow through the Narrows to almost nothing and as a result it silted up into the marsh  we see today. We did see either a white heron or great egret way out there…but even with the bird lens it would have been just a white dot.

Next up we stopped by the Colonial Life and Living History area to check out the wattle and daub hut located there…it contained our last clue and the third one we needed was found inside the museum at the visitor center.

Here’s a shot of the hut…which as anybody can clearly see just has to be Grandmother’s House.

Now I ask ya…how do I know it’s Grandmother’s House?

Ya sure ya don’t know?

Think hard now…but if ya give up ya can just scroll down a bit for some clues.

…

…

…

…

…

…

…

Why it’s got to be Grandmother’s House because it’s

…

…

…

…

…

…

Over the river.

…

…

…

…

…

…

And through the  woods.

…

…

…

…

…

…

Sheesh…I thought everybody knew that…

There was also the blacksmith’s shop there and Connie got a couple of shots of the equipment there.

Then we headed back to the Visitor Center via the Pines Trail…passing this mushroom that looked amazingly like a Blueberry Muffin to us…although it would most likely kill you if you ate it like the vast majority of mushroom species will. One of the things I can guarantee I’ll never do is harvest my own fungi…it’s way too likely that you’ll kill yourself unless you’re an expert or accompanied by an expert.

Once back at the Visitor Center…we did the math, opened the cache box…which in this case is a .50 caliber machine guy ammo box…logged ourselves in and took credit for our first cache on http://geocaching.com. I guess this means we’re not geocaching virgins anymore…and we’ll still respect ourselves in the morning.

As we departed…Neil got another shot back up Oak Road…again you can barely see the white fence in the distance…it’s the same fence as in the other photo from above but from the other end of the 1.5 mile long road which is essentially the driveway.

Our next destination was Jones Street…which is supposed to be the “prettiest street in Savannah” filled with old colonial era homes and buildings…we didn’t actually see anything there worth stopping for so…

We headed for our last destination for the day…the Candler Oak…which is supposed to be 300 years old and be the oldest tree in the area. Connie stuffed the address of the law firm it’s in the parking lot of into our GPS…she got the address off of Trip Advisor…and it led us to this oak tree.

Unfortunately…this isn’t in the parking lot of a law firm so Connie googled it again and found out this is just the Candler Oak Wannabe…which proves once again that you should never, never, ever trust anything TripAdvisor tells you unless it’s been independently confirmed by an actual source that knows what they’re talking about.

On finding out the actual correct address…we went there and got a photo of the actual Candler Oak.

Although to tell the truth the wannabe actually looked better and more photogenic than the actual one did. We also passed by a nice little park and Connie hopped out and got a couple shots of it and the nearby colonial…or maybe Antebellum era…buildings.

With that our day of Fun Stuff© was done so we headed home for lunch and some odds and ends we needed to get done.

On to interesting things found on the net.

Go go gadget…go!

Fark the police.

Bum…badabum…bum…bmp.

My name is Bond…James Bond…and you are?

A perfect match.

Still looking.

Shamelessly borrowed from randysrandom.com.

And finally…how to prank your co-workers…and probably get stabbed by them as well.

Cyas.

Ok…starting the last week here so it’s time for a report on our preparations.

Connie had her followup this week from her colonoscopy/endoscopy and got a clean bill of health…all of her biopsies were negative, she doesn’t have Barrett’s Esophagus as the doc thought was a possibility, and her drugs for her acid reflux are doing the job so she’s pretty much controlling that with no further treatment necessary at this point. She’ll need a repeat of both procedures in 5 years but other than that is “free to move about the country” as the car rental ad used to say.

Neil continued this banging stuff of the pre-underway checklist…everything is pretty much done except for refilling our propane tank and dump/flush/half fill the waste tanks with water, vinegar and Dawn but that will get done the last day before we leave. The idea is to leave them half full or so with the vinegar and degreaser and let the tank sloshing during travel clean the insides of them so that the tank level indicators will work correctly…they’re always starting to get a little flaky by the time we’ve been parked for the winter. We’ll let them slosh around the first two travel days and then dump/flush again when we arrive in Savannah GA on May 2.

Beyond that…it’s just normal packing before we leave…bikes on the rack, grill in the basement, take down the flagpole, sign, and our outside lights…and we’ll be pretty much ready to go.

Lets see…what else is goin’ on.

We keep heading out to the Elks on Tuesdays for Bingo, most Thursday’s for Tacos, and occasional Monday or Friday visits for chicken/fish respectively…we did increase the latter couple once we were into April as the snowbird crowd is mostly gone and hence the lines are shorter.

Connie’s been singing in what’s called the Resurrection Choir at St. Therese…there are a lot of Memorial Masses down here for folks that died and were buried up North but who had friends in both places. There seem to be a lot more of those than actual Funeral Masses…although the only real difference is that there’s no coffin at a Memorial Mass, urns turn up frequently though. She’s even scheduled herself for one the day before we leave…middle of the day next Monday…Neil told her she might have chosen……poorly as the aged knight would say…she decided to wait and see how busy we’re going to be that day before making up her mind and heading out…Neil will be busy that day flushing tanks but the likelihood she’ll participate in that is approximately somewhere between zero and negative infinity…and we’re doing the Broasted Chicken dinner at the Lodge that night to pass along our “until next times” to the our friends here and to generate leftovers for Tuesday night when we’ll be overnighting in Citra FL about 250 miles north of here. There’s a bar and grill across the street from the RV park that got decent reviews on Yelp…but it’s always good to have what we call…options.

We also need to pickup and put away all the stuff that gets left out inside for the winter…during travel season we have to do a better job of keeping things put away than we do when we’re parked.

Here’s a shot of the two eaglets today…

As you can see…they’re pretty much full grown at this point 116 days out from hatching. The adults are still bringing them food…at this point I would have thought they would be solely hunting on their own but apparently the adults will feed them until they actually depart the nesting area. Both are showing a lot of independence according to the blog on the eagle cam site…I actually thought they would be more independent at this point in life…previous years eaglets have been.

One photo for ya…a reprocessed shot of one of last year’s sunrise shots at Bryce Canyon UT…we got up at like 0330 for these. Neil took one of last summer’s unposted shots and worked with it in Luminar to get it looking a lot more like what it looked like with the eyeball. Like the bull elk shot I posted last time…it’s a lot easier to get photos that really pop with Luminar than it is with just Lightroom and it’s settings. Luminar is also going to include sometime this year a lot of the cataloging and image management features that Lightroom already has…if that comes to fruition and they’re actually worth using then he can see shifting over to Luminar as his primary management software. He’s taking a wait and see approach…he can always continue to manage in Lightroom and it includes the capability for export to Luminar/auto re-import the finished product to Lightroom. Adobe really would prefer you to export to Photoshop…which gives Adobe more money…and use it as the post processing program…but for non-experts getting great results is a lot more difficult in Photoshop as it’s got too many options and not enough “help the user” features in it. Luminar has filters with meaningful names like Smart Enhance, Golden Hour and the like…each of them has multiple sliders for the various settings unique to that filter so it’s not a matter of just clicking the filter…you still need to adjust the sliders in it to suit your needs for each image…but once you pick a filter…and you can stack the effects easily and mask them so they only affect parts of the image…there are a smaller set of slider options so one doesn’t get lost in the software. I’m sure that Photoshop could actually do everything Luminar does…but it’s a lot more work.

I really like the way this one came out…perfectly captures what it actually looked like that morning…crisp and cool with that really great yellow orange cast to the light and the sunbeams coming through the clouds as the sun rose just out of frame to the left. This shot was taken at Sunrise Point looking southward over the canyon. Sunset Point is a half mile or so to the west (right out of frame) and gets similar lighting to this but at sunset instead of sunrise…we visited both albeit Sunset Point was during the day and it was so crowded that we gave up trying to go back at sunset…besides the light is usually better at dawn anyway and the crowds were smaller. Not zero mind you…there were probably 50-75 peopled there that morning at 0535 when we arrived…the early rise time was so we could get coffee and drive the 45 minutes from the RV park which was literally right outside the gate of the park to the canyon itself, find a parking spot, and walk the 1/4 mile or so over to the point itself.

Interesting things found on the net this week…

Sounds ‘bout right to Connie…

The engineer’s view

Extreme hopscotch

How true this one is

Just in case you were wondering

I think I’ll turn back now

Not so secret then

Cyas.

Sorry I haven’t posted since the first of the month…but we’ve actually been pretty busy ‘round these parts. We’re down to the last two weeks before we depart Seminole…and Neil has been hard at work checking off items on the pre-underway list.

We started with about 62 different items divided between Neil and Connie depending on who needed to do them and including a half dozen that are actually things we need to do either in the Richmond area while we’re visiting the human kids or in the DC area when we stop by there and we’re down just about 10 items left besides the Richmond and Fairfax ones.

Connie had a colonoscopy and endoscopy last week…and once again the prep is way worse than the actual procedure. She was on no nuts or seeds for 4 days then a liquid only diet on the day before…and then the dreaded clean out procedure starting in the afternoon the day before. Neil took care of her as best he could bringing her bullion, water, and various other things so she didn’t have to move around much. Last Tuesday she had her procedures…everything came out pretty much as expected so that’s one of the major items off the list.

Besides that…Neil’s accomplished a whole bunch of stuff like

• Air up tires and check lug bolt torque
• Grease trailer bearings
• New front tires for Big Red
• Fixed our living room fan
• Ordered and received a bunch of spare parts we need
• Pressure wash Big Red, Little Red, and parts of the rig
• Finished up our federal and Alabama tax returns…we’re Florida residents so no state return there but our income from the Laubenthal Land and Timber Company is earned in and taxable by Alabama
• Check fluids and filters on Big Red and Little Red
• Finish ordering tickets and the last couple of reservations we need to have for the summer
• Schedule an oil change for Big Red while we’re in the Fairfax area

As you can see…he’s been busy. It’s been hot so between the days that we had doctors appointments we’ve been getting up early so he can start on the day’s scheduled jobs by about 0830, that way he’s done by 1030 or 1100 before it gets too hot. 

Let’s see…what else.

The eaglets have fledged the nest…although they’re still getting food delivered by the parents they’re actually as large as the adults are now. Here’s a shot of them sitting on the branch near the nest.

Neil’s also been working with his new photo processing software…Luminar as well as checking some new techniques with Aurora his HDR application. Here are a couple of shots from last travel season that he reprocessed.

These two shots came from the same exposure taken up at the Mammoth Hot Springs area in Yellowstone National Park…one was processed with Aurora and the other with Luminar. He likes the way both of them turned out.

Yellow aspen leaves in the fall at Rocky Mountain National Park…this is actually much more realistic to what it looked like with our eyes than the previous aspen shots I posted last fall.

A ram Bighorn Sheep along with one of his harem…this was taken near Rocky Mountain National Park but actually outside the park boundary on the river through the pass that leads to the park.

Bryce Canyon National Park Sunrise Point just after dawn…he’s not really satisfied with this one yet…processing the dawn shots still needs a little more practice.

The Narrows on the Zion River at Zion National Park.

 Bull elk crossing the Madison River between West Yellowstone MT and the western entrance to Yellowstone National Park…this was taken about 10 minutes after sunrise. The processing makes it look like a lot brighter than it really was…but I decided that being a bit brighter actually improved the photo…I did leave the Golden Hour orange light effect intact.

Sorry they’re mostly photos you’ve already seen similar shots of …although none of them are exact duplicates of what I posted last fall…but I figured I would give ya a little taste of what’s to come starting in just about 2 weeks. The scenery and wildlife up the east coast and into Canuckistan will be different than out west…not better but different. We’re really looking forward to getting back into the Fun Stuff© routine.

Ok, on to interesting things found on the net.

Enhanced Water

Urine Danger?

Instruction manual

This guy has the world’s longest arm

Anybody who was around in the ’60s should clearly understand what this is

Why…it’s the Chairway to Heaven of course.

Meanwhile…in Tobleroneistan

Brilliant!!

Sign for a Bong Smoking Skateboarding Horse crossing I guess

And finally…ya know what these are of course

Spring Buds obviously.

Cyas.

And happy pre-anniversary greetings (April 2 is actually the say) to the adults ‘round these parts as well. It was lo those many years ago back in 19 and 76 that Neil was driving Connie to their local drinking establishment down in Coral Gables FL at the University of Miami and uttered those famous words “Here, hold this.”…and dropped her engagement ring into her hand. Quite the romantic ain’t he?

Then just about 10,000 days later…again on April 2 and again in the car on the way to another local drinking establishment…that once again he repeated those famous words (well, they’re at least famous in our family lore anyway)…and dropped an even better diamond ring in her hand.

Anyhoo…not really much going on here the past couple of weeks. We had some lab work done and have doctor’s appointments in a couple of weeks, Connie got her colonoscopy and endoscopy (yea!) scheduled, we got new front tires for Big Red…yeah, all sorts of really cool stuff like that. 

The eaglets have fledged the nest and are increasing their flying range and capabilities as well as learning to hunt for themselves…but these days they’re mostly gone from the nest with mom and dad learning stuff.

We’ve got quite a list of things to complete before we leave…but made ourselves a checklist so that we don’t miss any of them…maintenance items and the like mostly. Nothing major, just time consuming so Neil will try and do a couple every day so that it’s not a rush the end of the month before we leave on May 1.

I don’t have any photos to share…so let’s get on to the Interesting Things Found on the Net.

Poor guy…tells the truth and where does it get him?

Our friend Bill Napier sent us this one…this is the strangest 5th wheel setup we’ve ever seen. Putting the RV on a low-boy trailer with a Jeep on the back is just nuts. We did some figgeratin’ on the pin weight and either that truck’s rear axle is seriously overloaded or the owner has a heavy duty truck and they just used the pickup to move it around the lot.  

How did man first learn to swear.

Nothing’s that good…nothing.

Helping people keep stayin’ alive.

Amen.

The sky crashed.

Cyas.

Well…as advertised…the humans headed off early yesterday morning to see what they could see. Talk about early…they set their darned alarm clocks for 0500 freaking o’clock…how’s a bear supposed to get his beauty rest when they get up that early. Ima blaming it on the damn birds…ya gotta be at the bird site at sunrise in order to get any decent pictures because by 0900 the amount of bird activity drops way, way off. 

At least they were up and out of the rig quick…so I was able to catch a couple more hours of zzzs while they took their darned fool butts off to wander ‘round the swamp. Here’s their report…

We arrived at the parking lot at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary about 40 miles south of here a bit after 0700 with sunrise scheduled for about 0735…we had stopped by Loves and picked up a couple of cups of coffee instead of making it ourselves before we left. Once we got to the lot…there were 3…count ‘em 3…other cars there and at least one of ‘em belonged to the lady in the gift shop. We ate a croissant that we had saved for breakfast and about 0715 we headed into the shop for a much needed bathroom break and to pay our $14 each entrance fee. Once that was done we looked out side and decided it was light enough so we headed out.

Now the basic layout of the sanctuary…which is owned and operated by the Audubon Society…is a big loop heading mostly northward from the visitor center with a lookout over the grassland at the far end. The right (west) side which is the advertised path…mostly goes through grassy/tree filled areas and has mostly song birds and raptors/hawks in it along with a few grassland birds.Based on our previous visits…wildlife sightings are much less common over on that side. The eastern side of the loop is in the swamp and goes past a couple of areas named Upper and Lower Lettuce Lake…they’re fairly large (a couple of acres probably) in size and the water is low enough by this time of year that the wader birds are close to the lake as most of the non-lake areas of the swamp have pretty much dried up by now.

Before I get into the photos…let’s talk about the effect of Hurricane Irma on the sanctuary last September/October (can’t remember which it was). The dry side of the boardwalk stays pretty dry most of the year but in the rainy season (June to December) there are a few streams and rivulets over on that side. In the dry season (December to May…that side is pretty dry. The swamp side is fairly deep in the rainy season…the water probably averages 4 feet deep which is way too deep for any of the wading birds and the water level is maybe 1-2 feet below the boardwalk. In the dry season…the water is 18 inches or less deep mostly and the level is 3-4 feet below the boardwalk.

The problem is that Irma came ashore just south of Naples and pretty much went right over the sanctuary…since it’s all connected to the Everglades ecosystem I’m guessing that the boardwalk was under 2 or 3 feet of water at the height of the flooding. It is designed to survive that but as you’ll see in the photos below there was some damage due mostly to things falling onto the boardwalk.

It’s pretty much back to normal now…a few areas remain closed and the boardwalk is pretty beat upbeat they’ll eventually get the rest of it fixed I guess. Anyways…on to the photos. I’ll turn it back over to the bear for his commentary.

This is a double processing of the same shot…the first is done just with Lightroom and the second with Luminar…and I can’t decide which I like better. The brightness in the first is closer to what he remembered but the colors are closer in the second one. I guess I should have upped the exposure in the second one just a tad and it would be spot on.

And yes…you’re right…that is a bird at the top of the tree in the center of the shot…Connie took the above with her lens but Neil was able to get a little closer shot with his 750mm lens…it’s a Red Shouldered Hawk.

Another shot Connie took of the sunrise.

Here’s a sequence of a Great Egret that Connie took…she had her shutter speed a bit low but was afraid to push her ISO any more…her old camera started to get noise at ISO 2000 but her new one (Neil’s old D7100). She could have gone up to 4000 easily but I kinda like the bit of motion blur the shutter speed gave the shots.

Cowbird.

Wood Stork.

General scenery and plant life…Connie likes these and refuses to carry a long enough lens (too heavy) for really close up wildlife…although she did pretty good as the Great Egret, Wood Stork, and Cowbird above were all her shots.

She got some really cool reflection shots as well…the water was dead still and with the early morning light it was really beautiful.

Neil’s fave reflection shot of the day…she took it but he processed it in Luminar to bring out the colors and reflections.

Great Egret…Neil got this one as he had the Bird Lens© and tripod installed.

Juvenile (immature) Yellow Crowned Night Heron…we originally thought this was an American Bittern but on further review and looking at Peterson’s we changed to the correct species.

What you talking’ ‘bout Willis?

More Wood Storks.

In flight…this species is one of the most striking birds you’ll see. Long white wings with black trailing edges and neck extended. Up close however…it’s the ugliest thing one can imagine…a face only a mother could love and I’m not even sure ‘bout that.

Juvenile Yellow Crowned again…Neil is pretty sure all of the shots in this post are of the same individual.

The only Great Blue Heron we saw today…usually these are like lice and are everywhere but strangely absent today. We did spot a Tricolored Heron which is very similar but were not able to get a photo of it.

Male Anhinga in breeding plumage.

And the juvenile Yellow Crowned Night Heron after he caught breakfast.

Some of the hurricane damage. This is the sign that used to mark one of the named very old Cypress trees in the sanctuary.

And here’s Guy Bradley today.

It’s about 6 feet in diameter and was pushed right over by the wind.

The Anhingas again…same pair as the shot above with the male staying very close to his lady friend to keep any rivals from seducing her away…male to the left.

And another shot of the same pair…I put this one because we never realized until today how bright green Anhinga eyes are…we’ve seen literally thousands of them and never noticed.

More Hurricane Irma damage…this short offshoot of the boardwalk is going to be left permanently closed to show the effects of the storm.

Adult Black Crowned Night Heron.

Limpkin.

Another tree that came down during Irma…although this one fell cross the boardwalk. The staff cut a section out and rebuilt the boardwalk late last year.

Another Great Egret.

Kingfisher butt…sorry about the lousy shot but it’s the best Neil could do. They’re hellishly hard to get a shot of as they rarely sit still more than 5 seconds or so. Add in their small size and getting a closeup is really, really hard.  This shot was taken at maximum zoom on his bird lens and then cropped to about 1/7 of it’s original size.

Barred Owl. We heard this individual all morning and finally spotted it on the way out of the boardwalk about 1000. There was a hawk of some sort harassing it…probably a territorial thing…but we never were able to get a shot.

Cowbird launch.

Couple of Little Blue Heron.

Great Egret on the hunt…Neil was never able to get a shot of it when it struck at a fish.

Another Black Crowned Night Heron.

And this is the adult Yellow Crowned Night Heron…what the juvenile above will grow into eventually. Compare this with the shot above and you’ll figure out why the Yellow Crowned and Black Crowned names came about.

And finally…this is the stork sculpture located outside the visitor center…they even decorated for Saint Paddy’s Day.

Ok, on to interesting things found on the net.

Seems suspicious to me.

More truth.

How you get off the bus in Canuckistan.

I’m glad somebody’s thinking of the teachers.

Drawbacks of being 100 years old.

Cyas.

Yeah…I know I’ve already said it a couple of times…but dang it there just still ain’t much going on. No worries though…tomorrow is Friday and we’re headed down to the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary. It’s late enough in the dry season that the water will be lower and the water birds will be more abundant close to the boardwalk.

So…I’ll hopefully have some more photos of various things tomorrow and will do another post then. However…sinceI dun already started this one before I ‘membered that we were going out tomorrow I’ll just keep at it.

We’re continuing to work on our final few reservations and such that we need for the upcoming travel season…Neil’s having trouble getting hold of the place we’re planning on staying in CT in September. We’ve also got a symphony concert up in Sarasota this Sunday and will be meeting our friend Robert for dinner afterwards. 

Our list of pre-underway checks is up to over 20 items…but most of them are ticky-tack and will be easy to bang out. He’s included all of the “order this stuff before you leave so you’ll have enough for the summer” things as well as maintenance, checking fluids and the like so that when we hit the road we’ll not have to worry about any of those…in fact he just thought of and added 3…no make that 4…more things while I was writing this very paragraph.

Connie’s off to an Ladies of Elks lunch thing this morning and we’ll likely skip the tacos at the lodge tonight as we’re most likely going to head down and have the fish dinner tomorrow night. Neil took out a steak form K&J’s that we’ll cook either tonight or Saturday. We’ve mostly been buying our meat at Costco for the past couple of years but some friends down here turned us on to K&J’s and we headed up…saved a bunch of money over what we normally would spend for the same amount of meat at Costco and so far the pork tenderloin was excellent last night. They are located about 35 miles from here so you need to save enough to pay for the gas…but last week we got our normal 1 package of pork tenderloins, 6 of the largest chicken breasts we’ve ever seen and 8 steaks…along with a bunch of fresh produce…for 86 bucks…our normal Costco bill for that much meat would have been 125-135 so we’re clearly ahead of the game on cost. The steaks aren’t quite as thick as Costco’s although I’m sure they would cut us some thicker ones if we asked…but they’re ribeyes for $5.99 a pound and that’s quite a bargain.

Just a couple of photos for ya today…although the actual shots are from his eagle visit a week or so ago he processed them in a new-to-him processing application. He’s still using Lightroom to manage his photo library but kinda likes the processing features in his new application Luminar 2018 a little better. Luminar doesn’t do any photo library management yet…that’s coming in an update later this year…so he’ll try that out when it’s available as he really doesn’t like paying Adobe a monthly 10 bucks subscription fee to use Lightroom…he would much rather just buy his software outright because the subscription stuff quits working if you end the subscription.

First up is a shot of M15…although on further review as they say he’s really not as satisfied with this shot as he could be…the eye just isn’t quite as tack sharp focus as it should be. He’s still learning the ins and outs of his new camera though…and he had it on Group Focus for this shot instead of Single Point Focus and the camera focused on the needles in front of him…Neil should have changed to Single Point instead of Group and put it on his head…and he should have used a slightly higher ISO or lower shutter speed so he could get a smaller aperture and hence a bit more depth of field…I’ll make sure he works on this tomorrow at Corkscrew.

Here’s another shot of the blown over by Irma tree…only this one I’ve included both the originally Lightroom only edited version as well as the Luminar only edited version…the Luminar version has a little more pop and brightening up the shadowed portion on the lower right was a lot easier/better in Luminar.

Ok…on to interesting things found on the net.

Think you know how politicians will treat you…this is most definitely the way to help you do that.

Medication.

Why one should always remember to wear underwear.

Pro tip…how to tell your twins apart.

Bit harsh for a sympathy card…doncha think?

And finally…instant karma.

Cyas.