15 April 2016 | Tregoning is in Whangarei Town Basin Marina, Whangarei, New Zealand but we are near Mobile, AL
Photo: Steep bluffs along the east side of the Apalachicola River near Bristol, FL
We returned to Gainesville early on Tuesday morning (April 12th) for Randall's follow-up appointment with his dermatologist. He had the stitches removed from his nose and then got new ones in his forearm after having a persistent basal cell lump cut out. The poor fellow has positively felt like a needlework project for the last few months but his chest and nose wounds had healed well so he was not going to look too beaten-up when it was all over.
Visible progress had been made on foundations for Karen and Bill's new screened-porch but where, oh where, is a carpenter to build the frame? There is so much commercial construction underway in Gainesville that a small domestic project is not very appealing so maybe Bill will have to work with the architect/contractor to build it themselves.
During our single night's stay in Gainesville, we booked flights (via Iceland) for our six-week trip to the UK from July 21st to August 31st. We look forward to planning our travels to visit friends and family there but in the meantime we set off cross-country through High Springs and Perry on our way to Bristol, FL. Here we found the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve run by The Nature Conservancy, where friends Jack and Annie live and work. We had last seen them at Annie's parents' house on Martha's Vineyard on the return from Tregoning's shake-down cruise to Nova Scotia.
Disappointingly, it rained all afternoon and evening, sometimes quite heavily, so we were confined to their house but that did not slow us down in our swapping of stories. Fortunately, the rain paused for long enough the next morning that we thoroughly enjoyed an All Terrain Vehicle tour around the SW boundary of the Preserve. This included bouncing down and up the trails to cross one of the forest-filled ravines and then walking to the top of the impressive bluffs to view the swollen Apalachicola River. Jack was keen to tell us about the pioneering work that had been done in the area on prescribed burning and longleaf pine restoration, while Annie skipped ahead to find various native springtime flowers for us.
Randall with Jack and Annie who never let a little rain spoil the chance for a romp in the woods
It was only a few hours' drive through the Florida Panhandle to our next destination in Alabama but we had one important stop to make on the way. For the past eight years, our mail has been managed for us by MyRVmail.com which means that our mailing address is at their offices. These are in Crestview, FL, a place that neither of us had ever visited before. This has led to some rather puzzled responses when we admitted as much to people who, on seeing our address, asked how we liked living in Crestview. So we detoured through the town and went to pick-up a few mail items that had accumulated in our mailbox. The office was full of very cheerful, busy, and young-looking employees. They were keen to help us and to hear about our travels (briefly) and it felt good to have an image of where our mail was residing before it was forwarded to us.
There was some drizzle on the way to our next stop near Mobile, Alabama, but luckily it cleared-up enough for us to enjoy touring the garden of our friends Joe and Gidget. They were understandably proud of their giant-leaved magnolia flowers and their numerous copper maple trees but it was sad to see that a blight had killed off most of the 400 dogwood trees that they had so carefully planted cultivated.
Gidget and Joe and their land-yacht
It had been more than a decade since our last visit, during which time they had both retired. Since then, Joe had taken on numerous projects, including restoring a half-scale model of a Civil War cannon, carving ornate handles for hunting knives, carving eagle heads in the bases of moose antlers (to look like eagles in flight), and tying tiny little fishing flies. The latter would be put to good use during the summer when Joe and Gidget spend several months fishing, hiking, and touring Montana, Wyoming, and Utah in their camper-trailer. We closed the evening by enthusiastically trading stories and photographs from our land- and sea-based travels.