Vacation

Recently we traveled to the beautiful state of Georgia to visit with our daughter and her family.  We had a total of 10 days - the longest vacation we have ever taken!  Of course 4 of those days were spent driving, or in my case, riding.  The scenery is absolutely beautiful along the route we take. We got to relax quite a bit and spend time with our newest grandbaby.  Such fun!!  Some of our time was spent helping with some decorating projects and hosting a yard sale,  The first day of the sale was really cold,  I mean really, really cold!  We sat in the garage in front of a heater!  The second day was beautiful!

We also took in a little sight seeing.  We always try to go somewhere interesting. Last year we went to Fort Pulaski.  I blogged about it HERE.  Here's a few more pictures from that trip:

 

Did you see the movie "The Conspirator"?  Some of the scenes were shot here. 



This year were toured Old Fort King George, a Pre-Revolutionary War re-constructed fort.

  

This is a bird 'house' in the layout of the fort.  So cute!

I

 It doesn't take alot of imagination to know what this is.....

 This is one of those historical sites where you can actually go in the buildings and touch things.  While very little of it is original, everything seemed to be made just as if it would have been in the mid 1700's.  It's intriguing to imagine the men and women living out their everyday lives in what we would consider 'primitive' conditions.

The vegetation is very close to what the soldiers would have had to live with, no manicured gardens here!  In fact, much of it is very swampy.  In one particular spot there is a sign warning you not to approach the alligators "as they are wild" .  I didn't stop to take a picture of that!  I walked very quickly and warily past that spot!  EEK! 
There's a small museum on the grounds that tells the story of the many inhabitants of the fort.

We had a great time! There's so much history in that part of the country,
All too soon, it was time to head home, back to the cold and snowy Western NY weather.  On the way we stopped at the New River Gorge.  We've stopped there before but all we could see were tree-tops!  This time we went into the visitor's center and had a much better view:

It's a looooong way down !

The bridge over the gorge.

The visitor's center was very interesting with alot of memorabilia from the mining history of the area.   If you're in the area you really should stop and look around and if you're really energetic, you can take the really, really, really long staircase down to the base.

I kept busy on the drive looking for and documenting gas prices.  The price actually went down in a few places between our drive down and our trip home.  What a difference from one place to the next!  The highest price was...you guessed it......at home! Good ol' Western NY.   We were glad we filled up before we got there. 

I'd love to hear what vacations you've enjoyed over the years or your plans for future ones.  Leave a comment and tell me about it.

PS.....You can read more about the Historical forts of Georgia in this book, and if you click here and buy it, I get a small percentage.



I'm linked HERE:

Our southern adventure

We recently traveled down south to visit our oldest daughter.  As we left our northern home, we anticipated warmer weather. Guess what?  The farther south we traveled the more snow we saw!

This is what we saw as we traveled through West Virginia.  Finally, around North Carolina, the snow disappeared. North Carolina! 

Finally, we started seeing this:

and lots of this:

Beautiful!

We surprised our oldest daughter by bringing her younger sister along!

We also saw lots of this:

and these

Thankfully, none of these:

or these:

Yuck! 

But lots of this....

While we were down there we took a trip to see Fort Pulaski ....

and Tybee Island...

See that guy on the left?  He's surfing!

It was a little chilly and windy but still lots of fun!

My girls picked some strawberries and then our daughter made us some delicious strawberry shortcake - yum!

That was day 1.  On day 2 we helped our daughter paint her living room and dining room.  We were exhasted when we finished but it looks really good. Time well spent!

The visit was way too short and before long we were headed north again.  Guess what we saw?????

More  snow!!!  Obviously Virginia and West Virginia didn't get the memo about it being Spring!
As we got closer to home we started seeing beautiful blue skies and NO SNOW....

Back to the familiar..

We had a great time and wished it could have been longer!  This was our 3rd road trip to the south.  This time I started keeping a log of where the best price on gas was, what hotels were a better value, etc...  Next trip we'll know to avoid the hotel whose continental breakfast is a mini version of a real continental breakfast.  I mean mini!  The muffins were 1.5 inches across and the danish were a whopping 2 inches.  And besides coffee and juice, that's all there was....not even a spoon to stir the coffee!  However, if we hadn't stayed there we wouldn't have had the happy fortune of meeting folks from home!  They were headed south as we were headed north.  They told us they were from about 30 minutes away from our home.  What fun!