Cary State Forest...Again!

We spent a whole week at Cary State Forest - I think this may be the longest time we've spent there, though we've been to the campground many times.  Now that we have the waste tote, we can stay longer in places like this.  I think with this stay we have finally stayed in every one of the 6 campsites in the campground.  

Campsite 1 at Cary State Forest

We enjoyed relaxing in the campground for most of the week, but did make one excursion to Amelia Island at the recommendation of some friends in West Virginia.  We walked around the town of Fernandina Beach, which was cute.  It had lots of shops and restaurants and many of the buildings had a very Key West vibe.  Then we drove up to the north of the island to Fort Clinch State Park.  We thoroughly enjoyed our visit there - the fort was in great condition!   It was garrisoned during the Civil war, the Spanish-American War, and World War II.

Outside the welcome center in Fernandina Beach

Atop Fort Clinch

We found a tortoise on the way out of the fort!

We had a couple of nice campfires this week, giving Aaron his first chance to use his 'bellows' that he bought at Aldi this summer.  When a more gentle 'bellows' was needed, he resorted to our designated outdoor anti-mosquito fan...

With his new 'bellows' from Aldi

The more gentle 'bellows'

Campfire time!

Sunset over the campfire

We had a nice relaxing week after our quick trip south.  Next we'll make it to the Daytona Beach area, where we're hoping to spend most of the winter at three Thousand Trails parks in the area.

Back on the Road - Lake Wateree State Park

We're back on the road in the RV!  We left West Virginia in early October, it turns out just a few days before the first freeze of the season - just in time!  

We followed a typical path down south - stopping at a Cracker Barrel north of Charlotte overnight and ending our trip to Florida with a stay at the Thousand Trails Oaks at Point South - but we switched things up just a little bit in the middle, stopping by Lake Wateree State Park just a little north of Columbia, South Carolina.  One of my friends at Duke had recommended this to me when we first started our journey, so I was excited to finally try it out!

Our campsite at Lake Wateree

View of the lake from the front of the RV!

Although we weren't lakeside per se, we did have a campsite on the inner side of the road that had a relatively unobstructed view of the lake!  We enjoyed watching the water from our campsite and several hard-to-access beachy areas around the park.

Aaron 'swimming' in Lake Wateree - this was a beach across
from our campsite

We enjoyed dinner from the campfire and found an adorable frog while we were out hiking.  We were promised views of a beaver dam on the hike but couldn't identify it anywhere along the route - the cute frog made up for it somewhat!

Building a fire

Fireside dinner!

Can you see the frog?

The most fun part about this park was the over-the-top Halloween decorations throughout the park.  We only took pictures of a few decorations, and I won't bore you with even all of those, but it was just really cool how much effort the state park put into making everything festive!  Based on one banner we saw we think they may actually host some sort of Halloween event at some point.

A skeleton family's campsite near the road

Skeleton fishermen!

If you're into fishing, there was a large boat ramp at the main office and then places to tie your boat up near the campground, so it looked excellent for that.  We're not into fishing, but we thoroughly enjoyed the serenity of the place and of course all the decorations!  I'm glad we finally checked this place out!

Disney Wish - Inaugural Season

Ok I know I know this still isn't RV travels, but it was another big trip so I'm putting it on here :-).  Our cruise credit from Disney that they gave us as compensation for catching COVID on our transatlantic cruise expired at the end of September, so we hurried to get ourselves a booking on the brand new Disney Wish to use it up!

Rapunzel is painting the logo on the back of the Wish!

We were SO excited to be on the Wish!  The 'grand hall' (as they have renamed the lobby atrium) was gorgeous, and the attention to detail on the Cinderella's statue - with Lucifer ready to catch Jack and Gus from under her skirt - was cute.

Although you can't see it, Jack and Gus are peeking out from 
the back of Cinderella's skirt, which is why Lucifer is waiting
to catch them in a cup.

We managed to snag a reservation in the fancy adult-only dining venue - Enchante - for the first night.  It was beautifully decorated and the food was great, but for the money we thought Remy on the Dream and Fantasy was better.  We did notice that all but one of the staff we encountered in the restaurant were from France or a French-speaking country, so that was kind of a neat touch.

Lumiere was your host at Enchante,
and he was hanging from one of the 
light fixtures on the way in.

The chandelier at the restaurant entrance
was supposed to look like the one from
the grand ballroom of the Beast's castle.

The Star Wars theming in the kids' area and especially in the Hyperspace Lounge was awesome!  We spent a bit of time in the Hyperspace Lounge just watching the ship 'jump' to hyperspace, which it did every 7-10 minutes.

We met Chewbacca and Rey at the
kids' club

A drink 'from Mustafar' in the 
Hyperspace Lounge - every drink comes
with a smoke bubble! 

This counted as a 'Halloween on the High Seas' cruise, so we dressed up in our Star Trek costumes for the Halloween celebration, on which night we dined in the Worlds of Marvel restaurant.  For those who don't know, my mother made my costume for me when I was in high school!  Aaron's is just purchased though...and I realized a little too late for the cruise that he no longer owns black slacks.  Worlds of Marvel was a fun restaurant with a mostly on-TV-screen show hosted by Ant Man and the Wasp.

Dressed up for Halloween 

The highlight of any Bahamian Disney cruise is of course Castaway Cay!  We had perfect weather on the island and the water was nearly a perfect temperature.  

Looking out on the nature preserve part of the island from 
the observation tower - we rented bikes to get there as always!

The first time I've ever seen a ray in the wild!  This was in the 
shallow water of Serenity Bay, the adults-only beach.

We also enjoyed the other 'free' restaurants on the ship - Arendelle in particular had beautiful decorations and a great live show.  

In the hallway approaching Arendelle

Pirate night was particularly awesome on this ship - the evening/adult-focused show was basically an 80s hair band, completely targeted at our generation.  Awesome!!  We enjoyed getting up close and personal with Pirate Mickey and Pirate Minnie - the first time since COVID hit!

Although there were some negatives to the ship - the venues were a little small, the animation classes were hosted on video rather than with a live artist, and there weren't enough options for evening music - overall we did quite enjoy our cruise.  This was our last big adventure before getting back on the road in the RV, so stay tuned for more blog-appropriate content coming up soon!

Summer RV Repairs

In between our various travels this summer and spending time with family we did find time to do some needed maintenance and repairs on the RV!  Here's a quick summary of our activities.

We took the washing machine out of its housing to try to figure out why it was overheating while drying.  After removing the housing and reaching our hands into narrow awkward parts of the exhaust, we found a significant sopping wet lint buildup in the steam vent from the washing machine.  Unfortunately, this is in a part of the washing machine that you can't reach without extracting the unit and removing the cover (not like the convenient removable lint screens on a standard dryer), so I'm not sure what regular maintenance I could do to keep this buildup from happening again.  I have high hopes that it has never been cleaned since the machine was installed and thus will keep until we're ready to sell the RV...we'll see!  We're hopeful this will fix the dryer issue but we'll see for sure once I try to do some laundry on the road.

Dissecting the washing machine

Next up was our regular annual maintenance - changing oil and filters and lubricating grease fittings.  We get a little better at this every year!

Annual maintenance always involves lots of fun time for 
Aaron under the RV!

That's all we had time for before heading to Europe - after we got back, the first order of business was trying to fix the dangerous cloudy driver side window.  Aaron bought a kit for this that came with instructions on removing and taking apart the window, along with new seals with desiccant to put the window back together.  This was a scary prospect, but after we broke through the excessive caulk sealing the window to the RV itself (which apparently shouldn't have been there), it was actually pretty straightforward.  The result was a crystal clear window...which, spoiler alert, clouded up the day we left West Virginia in cold near-freezing temperatures, but cleared up again as soon as we moved south to warmer temperatures.  So it doesn't seem 100% fixed, but hopefully it'll at least hold while we're in warmer Florida for the winter!

No window!

Taking the window apart

As a side note and completely unrelated, we decided to clear a bit of stuff out of my mom's house, and so I went through my stuffed lion collection once more.  I had given away about half of the collection when we moved to Europe in 2007, and decided I really needed to pare it down again.  I kept about 15 animals and donated the rest to the Teddy Bear Brigade at Gleaning for the World, which seemed like a worthy cause.

These are the lions I donated

Next up: the muck at Sunshine Holiday Daytona destroyed one of our theoretically indestructible jack pads, so Aaron sawed it off and drilled some holes in the remaining bit so he could reattach the bottom of it so that the same buffer would exist on this jack as the others that still have intact jack pads.  Unfortunately, the other jack pads are still well and permanently attached and can't be removed without extreme effort, so it was easier to rig this up than to remove the other two.  At this point we regret putting the pads on in the first place, because aside from horrible muck they are quite nonremovable and we don't really see the benefit that was promised.

Not so indestructible!

Attaching the remaining pad with wires

Our next job was pretty straightforward - we wanted a better way to attach our waste tote to the car so we could drive it to the dump station without the effort we went through to rig things on the road.  Dad gave us a decent sized carabiner that should do the job nicely!

Waste tote hauling apparatus

Our next big planned project was to repaint the RV roof.  After some research we decided to repaint it with Bus-Kote, which is the white paint you commonly see on school buses and delivery vans.  It has microbeads in it that theoretically provide additional insulation, and it is bright white to reflect the sun.  We immediately noticed a difference in our ability just to walk on the roof barefoot without burning ourselves - time will tell if there is significant insulation value in terms of reducing our air conditioning need.  This involved constructing quite a scaffolding around the roof as Aaron did not trust me to paint the roof without falling off!

We used ladders on one side and leftover steel beams from 
our basement reconstruction on the other to form the verticals 
of the scaffolding.

We ran boards between the vertical segments to make a sort of railing

Painting the roof

Our last big - and completely unplanned - project was to replace the spring in the slide cover over the living room slide.  While we were working on other things Aaron happened to notice that the slide cover no longer had tension on it - thank goodness he noticed it before we left!  We took the apparatus off and discovered the spring that holds tension on the cover had completely snapped.  We had to replace the spring and, since we had everything taken apart anyway, decided to replace the slide cover as well.  This was another daunting task that actually turned out to be much easier than we anticipated.  The old cover had many holes in it, so we are also hoping this will fix some of the leakage problems we had during intense rains!

That's not supposed to be in two parts...

Hanging the new slide cover

That sums up our summer RV activities!  All ready to get back on the road!

 

Europe: Part IV - Norwegian Star

Apologies that this is so delayed - the end of our summer was kind of crazy, and I spent most of my free time finishing my 111 page album of this trip on Shutterfly - and ordering it while they had their free pages promotion running!

The final leg of our European journey started in Southampton, England, where we boarded the beautiful Norwegian Star for our tour of Scotland, Norway, and Iceland.  As we understand it from the crew on the ship, the Norwegian Star was built for Asian audiences, and as a result has some unique design features.  We found the layout and decorations of our room and the entire ship to be lovely - particularly the opera house-style main theater, definitely the most beautiful we've seen.

The decorated part of the outside of the ship

Our stateroom - Aaron successfully bid to get us an upgrade
to a balcony room!

The ornate entrance to the theater - unfortunately we couldn't
really capture the grandeur of the theater itself in a photo

Most of our ports on this cruise were tender ports, and we discovered that at least this ship (not sure if it is common across Norwegian's fleet) uses its own lifeboats as tender boats!  This was our first time ever entering a lifeboat on a cruise, and it was interesting to see what it was like.

Entering the lifeboat from the ship

The helmsman of the lifeboat sat in the bulge at the top; if this
were an emergency, they would fold down the platform behind 
him to create additional seating

Some last comments about the ship before we move on to the destinations...as I mentioned, the ship was lovely, and the dining venues were decent and food good, but the rest of the ship-based experience we felt was kind of meh.  Our stateroom attendant was one of the worst we've had (a shock after our amazing one on Princess!), showing up late every day to clean our room, somehow always managing to be IN our room when we came back to it, and generally having a bad attitude toward helping us with things we needed.  The cruise director was absolutely the worst we've had - as far as we can tell, she did the bare minimum for her job.  She was cheerful but she didn't do a daily show and put minimal effort into the game shows she was hosting.  We also felt nickel and dimed everywhere we went - which I suppose makes sense given that Norwegian tends to be cheaper and offers this 'free at sea' package to all guests, which means they have to be making money somewhere else!

Our first port of call was Newhaven, for Edinburgh.  We'd already been to Edinburgh a couple times, so we decided to do our own thing and explore outside the city a bit.  The highlight of this was a trip to Cramond Island, the causeway to which is only exposed for 4 hours centered on low tide.  Fortunately for us, low tide occurred right after our ship anchored, so we were able to take a bus out to the beach and walk across the causeway to the island!  Neat!

Walking along the causeway to the island.  The large concrete 
bits to the right are what remains of an anti-torpedo boat wall
from World War II.

Standing on the island looking across the old WWII fortifications
and the causeway to the mainland in the distance.

We finished up at Cramond Island with plenty of time before the ship departed, so we took a bus into the center of Edinburgh and visited a few sites we hadn't seen before - the National Museum of Scotland, the Scottish National Gallery, and the National Portrait Gallery.  All were great!  They weren't the equal of their counterparts in London, but still reminiscent of those in London and very well done.

The National Museum had a viewing area on its roof, from
which you had a great view of Edinburgh Castle.

Aaron was very excited about this
meteorite that they allowed you to touch!

The National Museum was home to the taxidermized Dolly - the
first mammal to be cloned from adult cells.

My favorite painting at the National
Gallery - the picture doesn't do it 
justice, but the stag looked amazingly
3D when you saw it in person.

Our second port was Invergordon, for Inverness.  I had been to Inverness before but Aaron had only driven through on his way to a business trip.  We took the bus into Inverness and then on to Urquhart Castle, which I had seen as a child.  It was SO different!  They've added a visitor center, informative signs, and walking paths.  It is a popular tourist destination now, rather than a hidden gem on the roadside.  Unfortunately, I didn't realize this, and our purchased bus tickets did not allow enough time to explore all the new information as deeply as we would have liked, but we still enjoyed the visit.

Aaron 'swimming' in Loch Ness, as he calls it whenever he 
touches the water.

An overview of Urquhart Castle

Back in Invergordon - the whole downtown
had buildings with beautiful and huge
painted murals

Invergordon's real claim to fame seems to be as a construction/
repair center for oil rigs - we think these were bases for oil
rigs all lined up.  If you zoom in close you can see a 2-story
building in the middle of the front of the structures, to give you
an idea of scale!

Next up: Lerwick, Scotland!  Here we took our only guided tour on this cruise - a visit to Scalloway Castle and Museum and a Shetland Pony farm!  We ended the tour with plenty of time to tour Lerwick itself, where we saw all the sights - Fort Charlotte, the Shetland Museum, and Clickimin Broch.

Leaving with the tour group was interesting - they routed us
through the bowels of the ship to board our tender boat

Overview of Scalloway - the whole island a series of rolling green
hills with the occasional house.

Scalloway Castle - closed for renovation

Shetland Ponies!!  They were quite friendly
and came right up to the fence.

Clickimin Broch - they don't know for sure how this was used
or why it was built, but it was certainly fun to climb all over
and explore!

At this point our only-slightly-chilly explorations ended and we headed to the lands of cold wetness.  Our first stop in Norway was in Bergen, where the highlight of the town seemed to be the funicular railroad to the top of Mt. Floyen.  The area at the top of the mountain had all sorts of entertainment - a troll forest, playground for the kids, gift shop and cafe, and then a huge network of trails that appeared to go all over the mountain range.  We took the trail to a couple of lakes in the mountains but didn't go too far as it was cold and raining.  We did get far enough away to enjoy the absolutely beautiful scenery away from the main crowds.

A troll greeted us at the top of the funicular

One of the amazing views at the top of the mountain

Aaron 'swimming' in one of the lakes again

Unfortunately, all the cold and rain at this stop did a number on Aaron's immune system and he succumbed to a cold (we did test, it wasn't COVID!).  He didn't get off the ship again until we disembarked in Reykjavik, so you'll have to suffer through my photos for the rest of this post!  Our next stop was Alesund, Norway, where I hiked to the Aksla Viewpoint.  It wasn't nearly so high as Mt. Floyen or San Giovanni in Kotor, but still had nice view of what fjords there were (we discovered we really needed to be further north to see the Norwegian fjords in all their glory).

The Askla Viewpoint is visible at the top of the mountain, and you
can see the zig-zag trail I took up.  We took this photo from the 
ship right before it left, when the weather finally cleared - when
I went out it was overcast and rainy.

View of the ship and surrounding area from the viewpoint

This is apparently an iconic row of buildings in Alesund - it 
appeared on many postcards and pins.

Next stop: Iceland!  The sailing from Norway to Iceland was quite rough - according to the crew this was not unusual.  We could hear the anchors slamming in their housing as water gushed in and out, they put out the vomit bags, and the fog in the morning was so thick the captain had to sound the fog horn as we sailed along.  Fortunately neither of us felt nauseous during the transit.  We stopped at three towns on the northern side of Iceland - first up: Seydisfjordur!  We saw SO many 'tiny' waterfalls as we sailed in and out of the Icelandic fjords - much more of the fjord experience we had hoped for in Norway.

This waterfall was visible from the ship,
and was so much larger in person!  You can
see some people in the background.

The Tvisongur 'sound sculpture,' in which you could
theoretically experience a traditional 5-tone harmony.
I think you really needed 5 people for the full experience.

Next up: Akureyri, whose main claim to fame was a fancy church on a hill with great views.  I also walked to the botanical gardens, where I learned more about the blue flower that grew ALL over the hills in Iceland, and took a very adventurous hike through the wilderness to the original site of Nonni's house - this took me past a cemetery, which was interesting in and of itself, looking at naming conventions (-son or -dottir appended to a father or mother's forename, respectively, to create the son's or daughter's surname, respectively).

Part of the amazing approach to Akureyri

Apparently the locals feel this is their 
most iconic building (it is one of the oldest) - 
it was on the only postcard I could find
of Akureyri itself.

The Nootka lupin, which grows over 
all the hills we saw in Iceland

Our final stop before disembarkation was Isafjordur.  This town was TINY, but surrounded by beauty.  The main attraction here was the troll's seat, where legend has it that a troll sat down on the mountain (creating the depression), with her feet in the water (creating the peninsula holding the town and the deep water around it).

Attempting a selfie with the troll's seat in the background

The towns we visited in Iceland were full of houses covered 
with this corrugated metal siding - due to fear of fire.

We flew home on a PLAY flight from the Reykjavik aiport,
and it flew over Greenland!  Our first ever view of the island.

And that sums up our grand European adventure!  We had an amazing time despite the setbacks from COVID, and Aaron is all ready to go back.  We saw so many new places this trip, and we know there are so many more still to be seen.  For the moment though we're looking forward to getting back to a few more WARM cruises - this last one was so cold!