17 December 2006

December in South Carolina

Well, we’ve been back in South Carolina for a couple weeks now and I can’t believe the way time is flying. It seems like just the other day we arrived here and were planning our trip back up to PA for Thanksgiving, now here we are almost at Christmas.

The weekend of the 1st of December, Bill and I attended opening night at Brookgreen Gardens of ‘Nights of a Thousand Lights’ or something like that. Basically they have luminaries lighting some of the garden paths. Mostly I was disappointed, I thought they would have gone to greater lengths to actually light up the statuary in the gardens, but only a couple were lit up. One thing they did that was pretty cool was to put floating candles in all the reflecting pools that was very pretty. Just a shame it was a windy night, the guys in waders relighting all the candles sort of took away from it. It was also very dark, most of the gardens were only lit by candlelight, and I know for a fact that there are ponds with signs that say, “Please don’t feed the Alligators”. Anyway, we went, we saw, we left.

Other than that we’ve been going for our daily walks on beach and practicing with our metal detector (we’ve found 64 cents so far, thank you very much). We had a cold front blow through a week or so ago that dropped the temp down to below 40 during the day and into the teens and twenties at night, but it only lasted a couple days and now we’re back into the 60s with sunshine. It’s actually supposed to get up to 72 today.

We bought a freestanding fire pit that we’ve been enjoying also. Have had three fires so far. The coolest thing is that it sits high enough to tuck your feet under and they stay really warm because of the heat radiating off the bowl. It’s been fun to sit out by a fire and have cocoa, or to sit on the beach with cocoa and watch the sun set and the dolphins play. We see the dolphins at least a couple times a week, bobbing through the water. Sometimes they are really close, maybe 20 yards out. Between them and the pelicans (pelicans are huge), I could just sit and watch all day long.

It’s beautiful here and we’re both really enjoying out time here. We’ve made one shopping trip this year to support the local ‘Toys for the Territory’ drive. And I think we’re going to go out again on Monday or Tuesday and shop some more for either ‘Toys for Tots’ or the ‘Salvation Army Angel Tree’.

That’s about all we have going on right now. Prepping for Christmas, we have our little tree up, and walking on the beach.

;-)K

01 December 2006

December Already

I can’t believe how quickly time goes by. We’ve only been RVing for a little over 18 months and we’ve made 2 ½ roundtrips of the country. I keep forgetting all the stuff we’ve seen and all the experiences we’ve had. I have to keep going back and rereading my blogs to remember all the places.

The last couple of months brought us back the East Coast for a funeral of a dear friend and we’ve been staying in places we’ve been before and haven’t really done much new, which is why the blogs haven’t been coming. We do have some plans for the coming months to see and do new stuff, but it won’t be quite the whirlwind that first 18 months were.

All in all, not much is new or news worthy. We had a good Thanksgiving, Bill and I drove back up to PA to spend it with his family, we flew the guys out so they could be a part of it as well. It all went off well and it was a good visit for everyone. Bill and I took a couple days getting back (we didn’t take the RV with us, so it was hotels). We decided to swing out to the outer banks of North Caroline and stay in Hatteras, NC. We go there, both agreed that it wasn’t nearly as cool or pretty as everyone made it out to be, so we left. It’s flat and salty. Like Bill said, when you’ve lived on one of the world’s most dramatic coastlines (the Southern Oregon Coast) it’s hard to be impressed by flat salt marshes.

Anyway, we left there and ended up spending an overnight just south of Fayetteville, NC and drove to the South Carolina coast the next day. The place we’re staying was supposed to bring our house back out on the 29th, but screwed up our reservation with both our spot and the storage and didn’t have us scheduled to come back till 1 December. After getting that all figured out, they brought out house and parked it sidewise on the lot, so we ended up having to hitch up and reset it anyway. They offered to do it for us but Bill told them he didn’t want them touching our house again…can’t blame him. So we spent the 29th driving here, arguing with the people at the front desk about when we were supposed to return, resetting our house and tracking down my package that got lost in their system (long story, they tried to tell me they didn’t have it, UPS said they did…they finally found it after I told them they could just pay me the $150.00 worth of materials I had sent to me and that I would even provide them with the email receipt proving they lost $150.00 worth of my merchandise…funny how that lit that the fire).

After all of that, we are here, we are set down (straight in our site) and I have my package. All’s well that ends well.

;-)K