Monday, December 29 - Rainy Day

Monday, December 29

 

We awoke this morning to rain and a forecast for a rainy day. We abandoned our original plan to hang around Smithfield a while this morning and check out some of the many geocaches that are hidden here.

 

 

 

We were thankful that we were able to sleep well last night, especially after we heard nearby train whistles only after we had settled in our bed. I heard those trains again shortly after 5:00 a.m., but since I am an early riser, it didn't disturb me.

 

We had another misadventure after breakfast. We were baffled as to why neither of our key cards would open the door to our room (#325). I figured the front desk had made a mistake. After we had changed rooms last night, I couldn't find my earrings and feared I had left them in the original room. The desk clerk reissued a card to me so that I could go back and look for the earrings. So we had three key cards to two different rooms in our possession. We were waiting for the elevator so that we could go back to the front desk when Cordell finally realized that we were trying to go into Room #425 which was on the floor where we originally started and not Room #325 which is where we were actually staying. Even worse, before we left for breakfast, I stuck a do not disturb tag in our key slot and the room beside us also displayed a tag. When we were standing in front of the wrong room I did observe that the neighbor's tag was gone but I figured those people had left. I wonder if there were people staying in that wrong room. If so, I sure hope they were sound sleepers and didn't hear their lock clicking when we kept inserting our key cards!

Shortly after we began our drive this morning Cordell played a Willie Nelson album. One of the songs we found ourselves joining in on was "On the Road Again". Then Willie sang "Georgia On My Mind". I found myself anxious to be in Fort Myers where the high temperature today is expected to reach 82°.

We found ourselves traveling on the right side of the road again when we saw a rather long backup on the northbound side. Later, we ran into slow traffic, but our map app warned us and we were able to exit onto Route 17, a two lane road that was straight as an arrow. It paralleled I-95 and at times, we could see cars driving stop and go and we were grateful to zip past them at 60 MPH.

 

At 3:00 p.m. we crossed into Georgia and saw our first palm trees. We have been driving in rain all day. There were some geocaches that interested us, but we decided to pass them up and keep on driving. By 3:30 pm., the temperature reached 73°.

 

We stopped in Kingsland Georgia for the night after driving 400 miles which is a bit past my riding tolerance. We checked into the correct hotel without any problems. We enjoyed a nice rainbow trout dinner at the Cracker Barrel which cost about half of what we paid for our steak dinner last night. Afterwards, we made a quick stop at the local K-Mart so that Cordell could buy a couple short sleeved shirts. All his other ones are stowed at the bottom of the things in our Explorer and will not be unpacked until we reach our condo.

 

Our plan for tomorrow is to settle somewhere in Central or South Florida and explore that area for a couple of days while waiting for January 1^st when we can occupy the condo in Fort Myers.