"RoseGarden" - - - - - - - from - nscave

Why is south always down? We always say “down south, up north.”  Anyway we have made our journey to our winter location at Panama City Beach, Florida. Our houses back home remain lived in, so that part is easy, but its the little things that take time and planning. For example how to get a 3 ton truck load in a SUV.

The driving was busy in spots. We had a drive for several hours in an extreme Tennessee rain storm, with high wind and lots of road spray – from trucks. Thankfully in our SUV we were high enough to  be able to see pretty good, difficult for cars where their windshield level is at wheel spray level.

 

 

  Its not hard to tell everything travels or ships by truck these days. This picture is only a sample of the miles and miles of continuous trucks you can encounter on the interstates.  This is typical day after day.

Have to say, those guys and ladies are out there making a living, and of all the 18 wheelers we seen, there was only one that was a bit uncaring.

Even the ‘four wheelers’ as they call us exhibited good driving habits. Its amazing how well the intense traffic moved along so easily.

 

 

 

 

  

   There are some huge long loads on the interstates. The front of this load is the tractor with the hood up in the second picture. (I couldn’t get far enough back to get the entire length in one picture.)

   There were several of these containers being moved. Just like the TV program, only these are real.

 

 

 

Enough snow to make the ground white was encountered in Virginia, although nothing accumulated on the road. The temperatures varied all the way down, but were on the cool side, meaning around 5 deg. C many times.

We took 3 1/2 days to do the journey, with two vehicles traveling together. We used a set of Cobra walkie talkies to keep in touch and they worked very well. There will be a review of those upcoming on the website in the future.

Our motels, since we were in economy mode, were reasonably good, except for one, which was barely good. We still managed to find some humour in these where least expected.

 

 

  

 

   For example one place had senior telephones.  (We are seniors.) We could see the numbers with no problem.

 

  Not so with the shampoo that didn’t exist, or the old 32” tube type TV with the scuzzy picture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   Perhaps one of the more interesting encounters was these security instructions in one motel.

   “Do not keep valuables in the room.”

   “Do not leave valuables in parked vehicles.”

   I wonder what they suggest you do with valuables?  Makes that ‘keep on truckin’ statement sound reasonable.

 

 

 

At any rate we arrived in sunny Panama City Beach, Florida where the temperature may go to a low of 5 – 10 deg. C. some nights, but by early morning it goes quickly up to 20 – 24 deg. C. People still strolling on the beach, and shopping in flip flops and shorts.

Our aim this year is to provide more pictures and videos in the blog and on YouTube while we are here, hopefully on a reasonably steady basis. It is a little hard to get in the production mode when life is so relaxing. But we’ll try our best.

---

This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License