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Trip24

Tuesday.

We left. This morning was Pelicans in the Mist. Sea fog, swamp fog, then forest fog. The drive from St James Island to Apalachicola was wonderful. The plan was to stop and visit with Shaffer in Ft Walton Beach. Problem is, we stalled so long with the birds, manatees, and pelicans, in lower Florida, we’re pretty much out of time. That and the fact that when we called from Ft Walton Beach, he and Jo answered from Panama City, an hour back to the east. We visited on the phone and drove on. We’re down to making miles. We’re not making miles like the Shaffers do. They drive this straight through in their motorhome. Come to think of it, why do they need a motorhome at all? We drove dark to dark. We covered a fair amount of miles, but there were a lot of stops. Not stops to goof off, stops to do stuff. We stopped for gas and moved on. We stopped for lunch and to send a few emails. We stopped to talk to the office. We stopped for propane. We stopped after a few more miles and turned the propane back on. We stopped at five minutes after five at our favorite Louisiana yard statuary place that closes at five o’clock. Couldn’t see what we wanted through the fence anyway. We stopped for dinner in a restaurant, but it was too smoky. We stopped for the night and Judy made dinner. We stopped a lot. Did I already rant about Florida being a tobacco state? Everywhere you go, seems like everyone is smoking. Either that, or it’s still 1950 here. Clearly, this is not Boulder. The non-smoking consciousness has had no impact here whatsoever. Well it’s not just in Florida. It’s everywhere down south. Go into a restaurant and ask for the nonsmoking section and you’re likely to get that Deliverance stare. Found a shortcoming for the Brake Buddy. It is not good for use with tow cars that have sissy batteries, or gremlins in their electrical systems. Cars like, say, a 1999 Ford Windstar. The Brake Buddy plugs into the cigarette lighter of the car, and draws current to replenish the compressor when it brakes. So you have the ignition key on, the brake lights and turn signals flashing as appropriate, and the compressor recharging after it mashes on the brake pedal (at appropriate times). The weenie battery in the Windstar fades by the second or third day, the entire electrical system conks out, and after that, you’re towing a dead toad. More than once, on other trips, we’ve ended up disconnecting, turning the motorhome around, and jumping the battery from the motorhome to the Windstar. That doesn’t feel quite right, turning the mother ship around to come back and fire up the dinghy. So we bought a Delco rechargeable jumper battery. It plugs into 120 volt, or 12 volt in the motorhome to recharge. When you need it, it delivers lots of amps for a quick start. So once a day, I’m out back, jumpstarting the dinghy, so everything will work right, at least for a while. I think I like the sound of brother Bill’s system better. The compressor resides on the motorhome with his setup. All it sends to the car is compressed air. The compressed air ties into the hydraulics for his tow-car brakes. Everything is under the hood or under the motorhome. Capitalism. Free enterprise. The American way. The billboards along the southern interstates are not our finest hour. There are, apparently, a lot of casinos along this southern corridor, and they are all, apparently, giving away free money. We’re getting closer to home. We’re out of the Eastern Time Zone. It was fun being there for awhile. We’re only one hour away now, on Central Time. I was surprised by a road sign today. It said turn on headlights when it’s raining. How could Florida take a chance like that? Just, turn on your headlights? Then I realized we were in Alabama, not Florida. I guess Alabama dares to live life on the edge. Four hundred fifty miles. Baton Rouge. Leaving. Driving. Stopping. Driving. Stopping. Driving. No new birds. No drugs. No drooling. Tomorrow. Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma.

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Trip25

Wednesday. Up and gone before dawn. Louisiana, Texas, then Oklahoma. OK. Let’s make that Louisiana and Texas. We got to counting days and where we would end up each night. Our schedule had us going right through Dallas at five o’clock rush hour on a weekday. Then we had a five o’clock arrival from the east side of Denver on a Friday afternoon, when we live on the west side. Seems like we make that happen every trip. No matter how far away we start from, we end up going through Denver at rush hour to finish the trip home. From two and a half thousand miles away, we can drive home for a full week, and hit Denver five o’clock. Amazing isn’t it? Well, not this time. No way. We’re too smart for that to happen again. We saw it coming from three days away. We stopped early, before Dallas. We still have enough distance remaining to make another early morning start and not get to Dallas until after rush hour. We won’t get home on Friday evening, either. We put ourselves a half-day back to make the passage through Dallas and Denver better. That only leaves Oklahoma City, and after all, …… how bad could that be? We left Baton Rouge right at rush hour. But hey, it’s only Baton Rouge. We turned left to the freeway onramp, and were met with two lanes of traffic, completely stopped. Just before these two lanes joined the interstate, they merged. So here we were, creeping our way forward, wondering how many people were going to have to get hurt before we got our fifty-foot rig, towcar included, merged into the other lane of traffic. Well, we sure do like the way people drive in Baton Rouge. A car in the next lane, actually a little ahead of us, recognized the situation and backed all the way off until there was an effortless merge for us. Right after blinking a “thank you”, it was time to line up the next merge into the right lane of traffic. I looked in my mirror and saw a white van had dropped way back in anticipation of the event, and again, it was effortless. After that, every lane change to stay on the freeway, or to get off the freeway, as appropriate, was only met with complete cooperation. My only concern is that I might have imposed significant wear on the headlight switch, blinking it on and off for “thank you”, like trucks do. I’m remembering something about the brake buddy that I think is funny. I found the world’s greatest understatement. To set up the brake buddy, you position it in front of the driver’s seat, and attach the arm to the brake pedal of the car. You plug the box into the cigarette lighter for power, and it fills a compressor. Now it is ready to use. A mercury switch inside tells it when you’re decelerating and it’s time to help. When it is time to help, the arm attached to the brake pedal is thrust forward by compressed air. The compressed air tank is refilled by a small compressor. Normally, with the engine running, there is a vacuum assist, and you don’t have to press very hard on the brake pedal. But this system is designed to operate on a car that is not running, and it mashes the brake pedal pretty hard. Probably a lot harder than you can press on the pedal with your foot. If you pressed on the brake pedal like that while the engine was running, and there was vacuum assist, you would just lock up the brakes completely. Here is the problem. There is a vacuum reservoir. Even after you shut the car off, there will still be a vacuum assist. Here is the solution. Every time you hook up the brake buddy, you have to remember to press the “test” button several times after you shut off the engine. By doing that, you will bleed the vacuum reservoir, and the brakes can just operate manually after that. There is a warning in the operator’s manual. It says: “remember to push the test button several times after the unit is in place, or excessive tire wear may result.” Excessive tire wear? I had to think about that a little. What do the brakes have to do with tire wear? Then I realized, that if you didn’t bleed the reservoir, you could drive off down the road, not realizing that the first time the brake buddy kicked in, it would get full vacuum assist, and you could end up with a tow car behind you, at about sixty miles an hour, four wheels locked up, howling like a dog. There’s the understatement. Excessive tire wear may result. The route is easy. Drive west on interstate 10. Turn north on interstate 46. Drive through Natchitoches, not to be confused with Nacogdoches. That’s in Texas. Earlier, we described how expensive it was in the Keys. Even the State Parks cost twenty five dollars a night. Not all State Parks in Florida are expensive, though. Up in the Panhandle, the island state park was only fourteen dollars a night. Seems like it is just the ones in the Keys that are expensive. Now we’re back in Texas. Know how each state has it’s own theme for rest stops? They put out picnic tables and shelters. In New Mexico, the shelters have to also serve as wind screens. In East Texas, each shelter is shaped like an oil derrick. We’re back to the pine forests. They have a pine tree here that has really long needles. In Colorado, the pine tree with the longest needles is the Ponderosa Pine. They’re not nearly as long as the needles on this tree in Texas. I like the name. It’s called the Long Leaf Pine. How expressive can a dog’s face be? Judy and I were sharing some Oreo cookies while we drove. Annie was watching. Pretending she wasn’t watching. Judy asked if she wanted a cookie and she shifted her gaze directly to the Oreos. Seeing that Judy was going to cave in and give the dog a bite of a cookie, I acted swiftly. I grabbed a cookie and gave Annie the whole thing before Judy could do anything. That’s when the expression struck. Not the expression of disbelief on Judy’s face that I had made a preemptive cookie strike. The expression on Annie’s face when she suddenly found an entire Oreo cookie in her mouth. Has anyone seen the movie “Star Man”? There is a scene in which Beau Bridges, as a space alien, has his first bite of apple pie. His mouth falls partly open, the pie still in it. His whole face goes slack with an expression of disbelief. He almost drools. It tastes so good. That was it. That was the expression. She didn’t bite down. She just sat there, cookie in her mouth, expression of disbelief on her face, almost drooling. Then she looked around for a place to go savor it, and we didn’t see her again for an hour. She just jumped down from the dash, Oreo intact, and went off to enjoy it quietly. We stopped for the night at Tyler State Park, just off interstate 20. We have a wonderful winter woodland campground all to ourselves. Lakeside site. It’s cold and cloudy. No reason for anyone to be here. That leaves the entire park just for us.Rags got a nice long walk tonight. Four hundred miles. Driving. Tomorrow. Oklahoma City.

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Trip22

Sunday This campground is a really birdy place. Walked it. Drove the scenic loop. Figured out most of the birds. Lots of woodpeckers, robins, catbirds, mocking birds, tons and tons of bluebirds, warblers, pine siskins, a couple wrens, and a hermit thrush. This is an opportunity to see a red cockaded woodpecker, but they’ve left their roost trees for the day and won’t be back until dusk. We won’t stick around for that. We’ll save them for another trip. We’re on our way back to the beach. Headed for St George Island State Park. It’s on a Florida barrier island, like Padre Island in Texas. Saw that Florida sign about windshield wipers in the rain again. In all fairness, I should tell you the entire sign. They wanted to say something, and it would sound too stupid to just say just that one thing, so they had to expand the message. They wanted to remind you to turn on your headlights when it is raining, but can you imagine the lawsuits if they had just said that? All those people driving around in the rain, switching from high beams to low beams and still can’t see a thing? So they wrote the sign, “turn on headlights and wipers when it’s raining.” I can’t blame them. Here’s a question for you: Let’s say you’re sitting in the car by yourself, waiting for Judy to check us in to a State Park. There are birds all around, so your get out the binoculars to identify a few while you wait. You can even see birds in the outside rearview mirror. So here is the question: when you focus the binoculars on the birds in the mirror, are you focusing real close, on the image in the mirror, or are you focusing distant, the distance from you to the mirror, then back to the birds? Can you believe I’ve gone this long without even mentioning racquetball? I’m just demonstrating I can go this entire trip without thinking about, or talking about racquetball. My last session with Woody, the racquetball coach, was on December 19th. After an hour and a half or so, we always finish up with a game to eleven to conclude the lesson. That last game wasn’t going really well for me. I was trailing six to two when I thought to stop the game and ask if I had mentioned that it was my birthday that very day. Turns out, I hadn’t said anything before, and I got an enthusiastic “Happy Birthday” in response. Then something even better happened. Play resumed, I made a miracle comeback, and won that game. How amazing is that? Got to the island state park and got checked in. Being in this campground is like being in a giant bird cage. Everywhere you look, there are birds flying around. Not a lot of variety. They’re mostly mockingbirds, catbirds, robins, and yellow-rumped warblers, but it’s fun to be in the middle of so many. Good run. Not a power run, but I got to run on the beach. Low tide. Hard sand to run on. The shoes came off. I love to run on the beach. Fifty miles. Florida Panhandle. Birding. Driving. Birding again. Beach running. One new bird. No drugs. We’re still a long way from Denver. Tomorrow: time to leave and head for home.
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Trip23

Monday. Getaway day. Time to leave for home… Tomorrow. We need to spend a little more time here. Honest. We’ll start for home tomorrow. Today we started with breakfast, a three hour birding walk, lunch, a walk through the dunes and down the beach, some secluded sunbathing, a barefoot run in the sand, a snack, a walk with the dog between the alligator ponds, and now it’s dark and time for dinner already. We reconfigured the car/motorhome setup so we’re all hooked up ready to go at first light tomorrow, even though we’re in a back-in site. Usually, in a back-in site, you disconnect the car, back the motorhome in, and park the car in front. Then you can come and go in the car as much as you want without disturbing the motorhome setup. We reversed that today so we wouldn’t have to mess around with hooking up the car while it’s cold and dark. I have scored shirts twice on this trip; both times by buying things for Judy. Once while at Turtle Kraals Restaurant in Key West, and once while out on the boat. Both times, Judy got chilled, and needed something to cover up with. Both times, they were out of small sweatshirts, or medium T-shirts. So each time, we picked out shirts in my size, in colors I like, and let Judy wear my shirts then to be comfortable. When we look up campgrounds in the Woodall’s book, they often show length limits. In the Florida State Parks guide, they show length limits. The length limit for this park is thirty feet. The Bounder is thirty-five feet. No problem. We called ahead to the campground, they said “Sure. We have some big spaces left.” No problem. Now we’re in the park. There are lots of sites large enough to accommodate this length. There are lots of motorhomes in this campground our size and larger. We can’t figure out what the length limit means. It was cold on the way to Florida. Then we got warm. Then we hit a cold snap. When it gets cold outside, the Bounder feels a little drafty. The heater vents only come halfway out into the living room, so the whole front half is a little cold. Now that the trip is almost over, we remembered the electric heater. It’s a nice little heater with a built in thermostat, so you can find the right setting, then it just turns on and off as necessary. It has a shut-off switch on the bottom, so if someone knocks it over, it turns off. It’s perfect for State Parks, like this, where we have electrical hookups. We just put the heater up front and plug it in. It keeps the front half warm and comfortable in the evenings. Today, we’re way out at one end of a barrier island, with a speed limit of twenty-five miles per hour. We’re a long slow way from any services. We’re running low on propane. So last night, we set both furnaces nice and low, set the electric heater in the front room, and went to sleep. The sleeping temperature was perfect and I never heard either furnace come on during the night. Today, we have the same small amount of propane left that we did yesterday. We’ll make it through tonight just fine. Tomorrow, we’ll be on the road again, and can stop along the way for propane. This has been a good place for us to bird. It has been a good place for rags to bird too. We come back from our birding walks, and Rags is right there in the window. Studying. While we are identifying birds by genus and species, based on identifying field marks, I suspect Rags uses a different system to categorize. I can just see that little brain sorting them all out by flavor. The mysterious RV sleeping sickness never struck this trip. We’ve had a few ten-hour nights, but mostly, it’s been less than that; more like eight hours or so. We were never struck by a twelve or thirteen hour night. I guess we’ve defeated the dreaded sleep monster. We’re sitting here listening to catbirds all around us. They’re a gray bird with a black racing stripe on the top of their heads. They have a rufous patch right under the base of their tail. In fact, I think we got mooned by one today. Anyway, there is a reason why they are called catbirds. Picture a little tiny kitten. Flat face. Staggering and stumbling when it walks. It looks at you and meows. That’s it. That’s exactly the sound a catbird makes. Sitting here, surrounded by meowing tiny kittens. It’s enough to make a person smile. No miles. Birding. Walking. Beaching. Sunbathing. Beach running. No new birds. Tomorrow. We actually leave.
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Trip21

Saturday. Travel day. Got up cold and early, packed up, and headed over to the Manatee Sanctuary to check it out before we left. Spent a couple hours there. It was good. Manatees from above. Manatees from below. Beautiful grounds. Trails. Birds. Two kinds of woodpeckers, and wood ducks. Wood ducks! Paddling right out in the open where we could see them well. Remember how I described the painted bunting as looking like it was painted by a kindergartner? Wood ducks look like they were painted by McKee. Elegant. Exotic. Stopped for fuel. I have yet to stop at a gas station in Florida that had not disabled the handle clickers that let you start the gas flowing, then walk away. What is up with Florida? We have asked why this is several times, and we have gotten several rather elaborate answers, none of which make any sense to us at all. What they have done, is guarantee that you have to stand there with your hand on the handle, for an extended period with a motorhome, with your face right over the fumes. We stopped for a quick sixty gallons today. I did glance around to make sure there were no police watching and prop the handle open with the gas cap today. Can’t always get that to work, but it worked nicely today.Highway 19 got really nice today. It’s the kind of highway back road you want to travel. Good road. No traffic. Widely spaced towns. You slow down to pass through the town and look around, then right back up to sixty-five. Some towns don’t even have a single traffic light. Turned off that highway onto Highway 98 to go west through the Panhandle. Same thing so far. I know that will change though. We have been on this highway before between Pensacola and Panama City. I recall a lot of stop and go there. I had the greatest run today. The first ten or fifteen minutes were pretty slow and normal. But then the energy kicked in. I hit that zone where the pace picks up, the energy picks up, and it gets effortless. I feel like I could just run like that forever. I had a power run. It was brief, but it was there. Passed an antique store called the Plunder House. Now, how good can you feel about buying something from the Plunder House? How do you suppose they get their stuff? I have the same problem with a particular motorhome. OK. There have been a lot of motorhomes. And they all need names. Ours is a Bounder. We had a Jamboree. We had an El Dorado. Maybe we’re running out of names for motorhomes. But how much did the public relations wizard make for coming up with the name “Intruder”? I can see driving a Warrior, or an Explorer, but who would want to drive an Intruder? “Look out everybody! I know you don’t want me here, but here I come anyway. I’m the Intruder!” Annie found a friend tonight. She and Twitcher, a rat terrier kind of dog, ran each other in circles until they couldn’t run anymore. We have a very tired dirty dog with us tonight. Rags is still clean. He had to watch from the window. Bumper sticker of the day: “I had sex, unprotected, with the IRS.” Stopped for the night at Ochlockonee River State Park. Pine flatwood forest. Two hundred mile day. Florida Panhandle now. Birding. Manateeing. Ducking. Cat drugging. Driving. No new birds. Manatees. Dead opossom. Grazing armadillo. Sixteen wood ducks. Sixteen! Tomorrow. St George Island State Park.