Monday, December 9, 2013

Savannah, GA. St Augustine FL & California

Having departed Charleston we stopped for a couple of days outside of Savannah and went into the city about 12 miles away and walked the now familiar streets; had afternoon tea in the Gryphon Restaurant which is run by the students of SCAD and is housed what was a pharmacy in a restored building originally the meeting place for a Scottish branch of the Mason’s. The sun was warm in the middle of the day but there was a very cold wind and in the shade it was cold. Once the sun went down it got very cold and keeping warm in an RV takes some planning; we covered all options electric blanket, central heating, a little electric heater, winter duvet or lots of blankets and bed socks. As we are both tall and the bed was probably 6ft so a cold breeze could get to our feet during the night.

From Savannah we drove to St Augustine about 130 miles south where the weather was a lot warmer. Before leaving Savannah Tom had, after listing the Tow Dolly on Craig's List sold it to a most interesting man by the name of Jonathan White who is British by birth. Jonathan aka Cap’n Jon wrote a book called “Everyone Said I Should Write a Book” narrating in short story form some of his life’s world adventures including those undertaken with his wife Joell; the book is available on Amazon and is a fantastic read. They were heading to Half-moon Bay, CA we had hoped to meet for coffee but our respective schedules did not synchronize. We are beginning to feel very familiar with St Augustine which will once again be home for 6 months; before leaving for California for Thanksgiving we did some serious Christmas shopping in an outlet Mall about 10 miles outside St Augustine.  
We packed our suitcases and departed for San Francisco where our big job was to empty our storage unit after 3 years; we determined that the cost of storing and the cost of replacing the furniture won't pan out in the end. We found homes for some and consigned the rest. We stayed with Sairsha, Cearull and Leslie at the weekends, baby sat Sairsha on two Mondays which was a delight for the two of us. She is a very easy to love little girl, now has 3 teeth, ate all her meals and went for her rest without fuss when put into her crib. When awake she runs around the house…she is so fast on her feet! We also resumed a 15 year tradition by once more celebrating Thanksgiving with Leslie’s parents where we were fed and entertained in style; including Sairsha there were 6 Horgan (Tony joined us) around a table of 10.
 
The Sunday before Thanksgiving we met Kilian, Melissa and their two boys Cian and Caleb at Oakland Zoo together with Tony, Cearull, Leslie and Sairsha. The boys have grown so much in the year since we saw them; they will be 7 and 5 later this month and are fine strong and healthy boys. As Kilian and family were heading to Tahoe for a Thanksgiving break this turned out to be our only opportunity to see one another. While in Los Gatos we stayed with our friends Judy and Chuck and house sat for them during Thanksgiving week; we met our neighbors Sue and Bob and friends Amit and Anjali, Valeria and David, SaAn and Tadao and Ros and John. We had another wonderful meal at Maky and Mark’s; it was lovely to see Mark recovering so well from his recent chemotherapy treatment. The day before we left we took the Bart into San Francisco and had brunch with Tony and Stella (we had not seen Stella over Thanksgiving) we had a gourmet Brunch at the Ferry Building.


Monday December 2nd we headed back to Florida just ahead of a very cold and wet front coming in over the US. Meanwhile back in St Augustine we are having record high temperatures as the cold front passed just north of Florida. We moved into the Condo we’ve rented, emptied our RV “Rover” and delivered her to Oceangrove RV who will sell her for us.
So ends our 3 year adventure/odyssey and exploration of the US which all started and was motivated by an array of American Souvenir Plates that Adele’s parents brought back to Ireland in 1950 after their own odyssey; the plates hung on our walls in Los Gatos. It’s not, however the end of our rambling…we have a Plan A and Plan B in mind from June next and will post our next travel adventures on the blog.