Trip14

A warm foggy morning. It stayed that way all day. When Judy and I were in the British Virgin Islands, they told us they never had fog there because it didn’t get cold enough. I don’t know how cold it has to be for fog, but apparently 65 degrees is cold enough.

Got some new neighbors today. They pulled up with a 40 foot Hitchhiker fifth wheel trailer, with four slides! Four! It is the Champagne Edition. They quit their jobs in Colorado, sold everything, and are headed for Florida.

Rags the cat had a bad experience. We moved the motorhome to dump the tanks. Rags had gotten out and we didn’t know it. Judy was outside when I started it up and began to roll. She said Rags came bounding back to the motorhome and was running alongside it, on the wrong side, trying to get back in. She stopped me, picked him up, and put him inside. He didn’t want to get left. Good news for us, but traumatic for him.

Jim came back and finished the motorhome fix today. There is a wire that runs all the way from the batteries in back, to the tank indicator switch panel in front. He identified the wire. It had a continuity problem. He hooked up a meter to both ends of the wire to see if they were talking to each other, and they weren’t. Rather than trace every inch of wire, he just ran a new power wire to the panel. Now that the indicator panel in front has power, we have propane as well. We talked with him about motorhomes while he was here. He likes Bounders a lot. He says he hardly ever gets calls to work on them. We like that.

We birded the marsh. We saw the seaside sparrow! And we saw the marsh wren too! Maybe. We saw a dark gray little sparrow, but didn’t get a good look at him. We heard the call we had been listening for, but we couldn’t see who was making it. We spotted another little bird in the reeds that looked like a wren, but never got a good look at him. Not good enough. Oh well. Maybe next year.

Drove around and stumbled into a great bird wetlands sanctuary in the middle of a bayside residential development. Walked for miles in another marshy preserve.

Quiet day. Warm weather. Nighttime walk on the beach. Tonight was an iridescence night. I had forgotten about iridescence. I forget what it’s caused by. Microorganisms in the water, I think. The right disturbance of the water causes it to light up. If you were rowing a boat through calm water, the oars would leave smears of light in the water. A flashing pearly turquoise iridescence. A very eerie light. Tonight, it was best on the waves breaking farthest out. Waves we couldn’t even see in the dark except for the luminescence. It only happens for a few moments, just as the wave breaks. From shore we could see spots and dashes of light. Sometimes just a flash from the middle of wave as it first begins to break. Sometimes, as the wave breaks left or right, the light would shoot across for fifty feet, following the path of the break. Sometimes it would flash in the middle, then run out both directions.

It is very good.