There and Back Again

This trip we left just before 7 from St Augustine on Memorial Day. We quickly found that our communication hats did not really survive moving from one set of hats to another and kept coming apart, principally the microphones which don't really do much good when they are hanging down at chest level and not hanging near your mouth!

The first part of this route followed that of a few weeks back, along I-10 and up I-75 well into Georgia. We hit the Georgia line a little after 9 in the morning and finally did lunch at Arby's in the Pilot at Exit 101 where we also fueled up and I couldn't resist buying a stuffed monkey with such a cute face and soooo squooshy.

For lack of inspiration I suppose my new buddy goes by the name Pilot Monkey and rides up front with me, sometimes in my lap, or by my feet or up on the dashboard.

Without the communications gear, it was difficult to have regular conversations with Geoff so I switched to having them, rather one-sided, with Pilot Monkey including talking about all the horse trailers with harness racing gear headed south along with lots of dune buggies and lots of Georgia State Police making traffic stops.

Mid-afternoon we arrived at our planned stop for the night, the Forest Glen RV Park. It was not their fault that part of the access road was closed for construction and it was raining but it wasn't a great place and we just pulled into our not very level graveled spot in the rain and just plugged in to shore power, skipping the water hookups. It does seem to be primarily a mobile home park with a smaller area for RV's.

Of course our first 'adventure' is discovered in the morning - there is a leak in the roof or around the window on my side of the bedroom! Nice cold, wet, water! Ewww, first thing in the morning. There are now uneven places in that wall! Tried to take pictures but it just doesn't show well enough!

We left about 7:30 that morning and an hour later are trapped in Atlanta rush hour traffic! We poked along in off and on rain, often going only 5-10 miles an hour, sometimes even at a complete stop. It did give me time to see all the signs saying English Ivy Kills Trees which seem to be everywhere in this area. Further research on this reveals that all that pretty ivy on trees does kill the tree. Partly by hiding anything wrong with the tree but also, primarily, by covering the tree preventing sun and water from reaching it and eventually weighing more than the tree can hold. There does not seem to be any acknowledgement anywhere about who puts all those signs out though!

We finally got to Tennessee around noon and a couple of hours later hit our fuel stop at a Flying J. Late that afternoon we got to Cumberland Gap National Park which covers three states: Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. We stayed in the park in a lovely quiet spot surrounded by trees, the only drawback a minor one in that Geoff had to back in to it.