Thursday, February 14, 2013

Day 25, Thursday, February 14, 2013, a.m.



 
Valentine’s Day and it means nothing to me; just a reminder that I’m alone. This is the one day a year that I really miss having a man in my life. Oh, well. It is what it is.

The skies are overcast, but it looks like it might clear.

A restless night as I was warm. I had the a/c at 68 degrees. While watching tv last night, some guy in a big pick-up truck sat outside my window with his vehicle running. He was probably smoking as this is a non smoking facility and it was raining. I try to keep the volume low so as not to disturb people in the next room. I could barely hear and missed a lot.

After 24 nights I should know to ask for an upper floor and the side away from the highway. That said, this is not a bad place. It’s the biggest room I’ve stayed in so far and at the least amount of money.  Two of us could do the Tai Chi form here.

I watched a couple of episodes of Duck Dynasty. It’s one of those reality type shows where they follow the antics of a family. From what I understand, this family (I think they’re in Louisiana) made it big on making duck decoys and duck calls. For the most part, it’s a red neck type of family, but one son went off to college and was able to turn the family business into a huge success. After watching the two shows and seeing them trying to shoot beavers because the beavers built a dam which dried up their duck hunting pond, attempting to get a honey filled bee hive which was in a tree in the swamp, and hunting frogs in the dark murky swamp waters, I’ve seen enough.

On another channel I often watch, they were alligator hunting. No, thank-you. Oh, I miss my DVR. During commercials, I looked through brochures and tried to jot down some things that I missed mentioning in the blog.

I crossed at least seven rivers and creeks yesterday starting from the border of Florida and Georgia and the St. Mary’s River. I thought I’d try to list them using the map. There’s a part of me that wishes someone was traveling with me. As I’m driving, there are things to photograph and notes to take; many things I miss and don’t fully recall by the time I stop. I can’t take the time to stop when I have these flashes of inspiration. For one thing, it’s dangerous on the highway to randomly pull over and impossible on bridges. Plus, it would take me forever to get from point A to point B if I stopped every time I got excited over what I was seeing or wanted to write down thoughts or ideas.

I can’t cover everything. There’s a huge amount of territory between here and N.H. The landscape changes from the highway lined on both sides with palm trees, live oaks, and other vegetation. There were bare limbed trees sprouting new green leaves or red buds. Then it would change to open marsh lands along creeks or rivers where, if I dared take the time, I could see miles across the expanse.

Rte. 95 goes over most towns where there are exits. I get glimpses of the road below which is often as straight as 95 in both directions. Sometimes there are stores and businesses and in the bigger towns and cities, even those seem to go on and on for awhile. When you think about it, our interstate systems are phenomenal. The building of the major highways and bridges is mind boggling.

This reminds me, I didn’t talk about driving through Jacksonville yesterday. For the most part, Rte. 95 is straighter than straight. It’s miles and miles of straight, fairly boring road. In Jacksonville, the speed limit drops to 60 and the route winds above the city with long curves to the right, then curving to the left. There are highways and ramps curving above and below on amazingly tall concrete columns. It made me feel that I’m in some futuristic movie, but I couldn’t look around; my focus had to be on the traffic and making sure I stayed in the correct lane. I would have loved to get pictures of all that.

Today, I plan on entering the historic district of Savannah. There are a couple of trolley tours that caught my interest that sound similar to the Red Train Tour in St. Augustine. As a matter of fact, one group is actually the same company as one of the other St. Augustine tour groups, Old Town Trolley Tours. I like the idea of having a number of stops where I can get off, wander around and then be able to get back on later.  I’ll go to the visitor center to further my plans and buy tickets. I may even take a riverboat cruise.

There are Ghost Tours, too, at night. Savannah was voted one of the most haunted cities in America. But being alone and not liking to be out after dark I won’t be doing this tour.

There’s a Comfort Inn & Suites in the downtown area and I’d like to book into that for tonight and hopefully stay a couple of days. We’ll see how it goes.


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