On the road again!

November 3 finds us leaving the Nottely RV Park and heading to Lawrenceville, Georgia and the Stone Mountain Hamfest.  We have attended this ham radio show the last five years and 2000 would be no exception.  We traveled south over Blood Mountain, crossing the Appalachian trail at Neals Gap near 3800 feet.  We followed our dear friends Pappy and Cecile Doughty, K5PRE and WA4WTK.   We picked up I 985 north of Gainesville and then took some back roads across Hog Mountain to avoid I 85 near Atlanta.

The Hamfest was great and we got to see a lot of our old friends from all over Georgia and especially from our radio club, The Gwinnett Amateur Radio Society or GARS.  While at the fest, I bought a new HF antenna for the Discovery.  It is a Solar 99A.  This antenna is a fiberglass pole designed for 10 meters, but with my Icom tuner it will tune 80 through 6 meters.  I built a couple of racks for the antenna to ride on when folded down over the roof.  It will be much stronger than the current whip I am tuning and it looks a little better (my opinion, not necessarily the neighbors)  Just to clarify a little bit about antennas, the fiberglass has nothing to do with the antenna efficiency, it just provides a solid pole for the wire inside it which is the real antenna.  I also bought a new VHF/UHF duoband radio the Kenwood TM D700A.  This radio has a built in Terminal Node Controller and Automatic Packet Reporting System software built into it.  It allows you to follow us as we travel around the country.  Simply log onto  http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/find.cgi?ke4d  and look for my callsign, KE4D.  The site will produce my callsign in the exact location where we are parked.  You can even link to a satellite photo of the exact area when available.  In the future, (when I get time to get the interface done) you will be able to follow us a we actually move down the road.  I have placed a link to this site on our Table of Contents page also.

On Sunday afternoon, we rolled out of Lawrenceville and headed down Georgia 20 to Conyers.  At Conyers, we picked up I 20 heading east toward Columbia, SC.  About 35 miles east of Conyers, we hung a right onto U.S. 441 and then followed it south to I 16.  I 16 runs directly into Savannah, our next destination.  We spent Sunday night in  Beaver Run campground in Pulaski.

Monday morning, we got out of the campground around 10:30 or 11:00 and headed east toward Savannah.  We arrived at the Whispering Pines RV Park in Rincon, just west of Savannah in the early afternoon.  This is a nice park, even though the sites are sand and gravel.  We parked facing the 6 acre lake and spent the next three days there.  The park belongs to the Passport America network, so it cost us $11 per day for the three days we stayed there.

Tuesday saw us driving into Savannah looking for the visitor center.  Unfortunately, we missed a turn and wound up on the opposite side of the city from our destination.  We decided to just go on to Tybee Island and the coast, returning to downtown later in the afternoon.

On the way to Tybee, we passed Ft. Pulaski.  After a quick tour of Tybee, a short stop at the Tybee visitor center and a drive to the Tybee lighthouse, we returned to Ft. Pulaski.  Using our Golden Eagle Park Pass, we got in free and watched a very interesting film about the building of the fort. 

Pulaski was constructed between 1829 and 1847.  One of the engineers for this structure was a young West Point graduate named Robert E. Lee.  Pulaski was named for a man who gave his life retrieving the colors for the Colonials during the revolutionary war.  The fort was built to protect Savannah from invasion or attack from the sea.  It is constructed of bricks and earth, utilizing 25 million bricks, many shipped from the port of Boston.  Savannah brick was used for the lower structure and New England bricks,  which were denser and thus harder, were used for the upper structure.  It took 18 years to build this fort and a day and a half to breech the walls and cause the Confederates to surrender.  After the Federal forces captured Hilton Head Island early in the Civil War, they moved several batteries of cannon to Tybee Island, Georgia.  Some of these batteries were composed of rifled cannon, the first ones ever used in warfare.  Until that time, no cannon bombardment could seriously impact the hefty brick and earthen fortifications in buildings like Ft. Pulaski.  The Southern Forces were not really concerned with the bombardment of cannonballs except that they did put up a wooden palisade to protect the interior walls of the fort.  However, the rifled cannon shot was much more accurate and much more deadly than generic round cannon balls.  They breached the SouthEast corner of the fort and the Confederates were forced to surrender.  You can still see cannon ball imbedded in the walls of the fort left from the Civil War. 

We went back to Savannah the next day and took two tours of the city.  In the morning, we did a tour of the historic district.  On this tour, we learned about the founder of Savannah, James Edward Oglethorpe, who landed on the shores of the Savannah River in 1733.  He chartered the 13th colony, Georgia, in the name of King George II.

Oglethorpe laid out the city of Savannah in a grid design with 24 public parks set at regular intervals throughout the town.   21 of these parks still exist.   One of our first stops on this tour was the waterfront area.  The river flows below a bluff that parallels East Bay street.  There are several roads that go from the bluff top to the river is paved with ballast stones taken from sailing ships that visited Savannah in the 1700s. The river road is also cobblestone built from ballast stones.  There is a now unused railroad track that runs the length of River Road.

Another stop on our tour was the Davenport house.  This house was built by a shipbuilder turned developer between 1815 and 1820.   It is a Federal Style house with a very unique open well cantilevered staircase.

We saw the Andrew Low house built in 1849 and the birthplace of Girl Scout Founder, Juliette Gordon Low.  This was a great tour and we really enjoyed seeing the historic district of Savannah.   It was quite amazing to see the restored homes sitting next to non restored ones. 

In the afternoon, we took the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Tour.  This tour takes you to the places mentioned in the book of the same name.  The highlight for us, was the tour to the Bonaventure Cemetery.  Included in the cemetery was the grave site of Gracie,    the Mercer family plot, site of the songwriter Johnny Mercer's grave.  The gravestone here with the iron cross is one of the Mercer family who served in the Civil War.  The iron cross denotes a Confederate States of America soldier.  The tour guide was very knowledgeable about the different markers in the cemetery and we learned a great deal about society in our early history and how they treated death.  For example, the term grave yard shift was originated in these old cemeteries.  Folks were very afraid of being buried alive since science and medicine was not always able to tell if one was really dead.  Many folks were buried with a string tied to their hand that extended up from the grave to a bell located above ground.  Men were hired to sit there all night on the "grave yard shift"  listening for "dead ringers".

After Savannah, we headed south on I 95 toward St. Augustine.  We fueled up near Brunswick, Georgia, paying $1.39.9 for diesel fuel, knowing that it would be much more expensive in Florida.  We crossed the Florida state line and headed on down to St. Augustine.

In St. Augustine, we stayed at the Beachcomber RV resort.  This park is on A1A directly across the road from the ocean.  The sites are rather small and cramped, but since this is  Coast to Coast affiliate, it only cost us $6 per day to stay there.  We paid up for a week and settled in.  Our friend Hawk Milner, the ex B17 pilot we met in Goshen in September was there, so we went to dinner four nights in a row with him.  It was good to run into him again.  (In fact, as I finish this update, Hawk has called and is coming to Okeechobee tomorrow 12/11, to go to lunch with us.)

We did a walking tour of downtown St. Augustine and took a picture of the Castillo De San Marcos intending to come back the next day to re tour this historic fort.  We had been here many years ago when we lived in Florida, but wanted to see it again.

Our plans changed rather abruptly the next morning as we got a call that Libby's mother had passed away.   We moved the rig from St. Augustine, to our daughters driveway in St. Petersburg.  We rented a larger car and picked up Libby's brother and sister in law in Plant City and the four of us drove to Conyers, GA for the service.  We left St. Petersburg on Thursday, were at the service on Friday outside Atlanta and drove back to St. Pete on Saturday.  While we were in Georgia, we got word that our good friend Tom Lourigan, WA4RBM had also passed away.  There was no way we could make it to the service for Tom so we just headed back to Florida.  When we got back to St. Pete, one of my ex coworkers called to tell us that another friend of ours who was in his mid 40s, had suffered a heart attack and also passed away.  Needless to say, this was not a good week for us.

We stayed at our daughter Megan's house Saturday night, boondocking in her driveway and on Sunday, moved the rig to Lazy Days campground.

You may remember that we were at this campground in January and were less than pleased with it.  Now it is undergoing its third rebuild in a year and it appears that they have it right this time.  The best part of this park is the clubhouse and its 6 computers and 5 cubicles with jacks for accessing the net.  We had our 24k lube job done at Lazy Days along with the annual refrigerator maintenance.   We also had the Fleetwood power steering hose recall done while at LD.   We have  a leveling jack that is leaking fluid and Lazy Days scheduled us for a replacement under warranty.  Since we will be back there on 2/1 for a Discovery rally, we are having that work done then.  We ate Thanksgiving dinner at Cracker Barrel with our sons Taylor and Sean and Taylor's girlfriend Faith.  Our friends Bonnie and Tom Breward were at Lazy Days and also ate dinner with us.  Bonnie and Tom were at the Lake Nottely RV resort with us the last two years.  They are also now in Okeechobee as are we and we have already been to visit with them once.

On Friday, our daughter and her husband Kevin had bunches of family over for a more traditional Thanksgiving dinner.  It was the first time since last January, that we had had our entire family together.  The only one missing was Sean's wife Linda who was in Argentina with her mother.

We played with the grandtwins and caught up on old times with our kids and friends.  We also moved the rig to the Encore park one exit east of Lazy Days.   This park is a Good Neighbor Park and we spent a week there for $11 per night.  The folks at Encore have put a lot of work and money in this park and it really shows.

On December 1, my birthday, we headed south for Okeechobee and a month of R and R at the Ancient Oaks Rv Resort.
 
 
 

Camping Fees for November  $309
Diesel Fuel for November       $165.94