Tuesday morning, Sherry and Alan had to head home, so we were on our own for adventures today. I had a scenic drive in mind, but Sherry had mentioned that Tallulah Falls State Park and Gorge was nice, so I checked that out. It looked like a fun place to see, so I figured we could go there first, then maybe continue our drive. It was pretty chilly and breezy, but clear and beautiful. Being a Pacific Northwest girl, and now Florida girl, I can’t get over how little underbrush there is here in the Georgia forests. I’ve lived in three places in my life: Florida, Western Washington, and Alaska. (Alaska was 40 years ago.). The two most recent places have nearly impenetrable undergrowth!
OH! I forgot to tell you some good news! While we were at the Antique Mall yesterday, Kenny got a call from the RVOne place in Tampa, and they said that our window for Nitro is in, they’ve looked at it, and it isn’t broken. YAY!! 🥳. We’ve been working with Christian there, and it was his last day before going to a new job. Uh-oh! At least we got his supervisor’s name and number so we’d have someone to work with. So this morning, Kenny was on the phone with the glass installation place in Sebring, but they can’t get us in until April 4, with a slight possibility for March 27. Neither date is good since we’re supposed to be in Texas for a non-refundable off-road camping and riding reservation on March 30. He went back and forth with RVOne and Sebring, and it wasn’t looking good. GRRR. Now what are we going to do?! 🤷♀️🤨. I may have to erase a lot of pencil plans. This is our life – living in pencil! Our daughter-in-law says that every spring is a debacle. Yep, it seems to be! Last year it was the boat. This year it’s the trailer. Well, we’ll ponder options while we go exploring today. Maybe we’ll have an epiphany.
Tallulah Falls was about an hour drive from our park. Along the way, I did a search for any breweries in the area. I figured that if I was lucky enough to get Kenny to do any hiking, I would need to buy him a beer. SHAZAM! The brewery that makes Frankenstark is very close by! And, they make a coffee milk stout named KAWI. WHAT?!?!? A beer named after our side-x-side Kawasaki? We definitely have to go there and try these two beers!
We found the state park, paid our $5/vehicle entrance fee, bundled up, and went for a stroll.
There was a bunch of information in the Visitor’s Center about the Tallulah Falls Dam and the advent of hydroelectric power in Georgia. At the time the 72MW power plant was built in 1913, it was the third largest in the country after Niagara Falls and the Keokuk in Iowa on the Mississippi River. It has been in continuous use ever since.
We took a stroll outside in the crisp breezy day to check out a couple of the overlooks. The Tallulah and Tugalo Rivers have a natural drop of 1200 feet in elevation over 26 miles, so there are some very nice natural waterfalls. This whole area of Georgia has LOTS of waterfalls, as I think it might be the foothills to the Appalachian Mountains.
There was a lot of wooden deck platforms and stairs to see various views of the river and waterfalls.
We read this sign and looked at our little paper map. Hmmmmm. It’s actually 310 steps down to the suspension bridge + 310 steps back up to make the 620. Not that I’m a super fan of suspension bridges, but I kinda wanted to go see. Kenny agreed to go! YAY! At least we were doing the “down” first, because once his knees get tired, walking downhill or down steps is really painful for him.
So down, down, down we went. You can just see the bridge to the right of Kenny.
There it is, crossing the Tallulah River gorge.
It was actually pretty stable, not like a swinging Indiana Jones kind of bridge made out of ropes and slats of wood. Kenny couldn’t even bounce it, which I was happy about. 😵💫. (Of course, he tried.)
The view looking down-river.
On the other side of the bridge was another sign. We could go left and go down 221 steps to another platform. Mmmmm – probably not. Or we could go up 347 steps to the South Rim Trail. We came down from the North Rim. Our paper map showed how to get back to the Visitor’s Center, so we decided we might as well go this way and see some more and different stuff.
Up, up, up!! At least there were occasional platforms where we could stop and enjoy the view. There were benches for sitting at a couple of them, which we took advantage of. We just went slow and we both did ok.
The scenery was pretty, but I bet it will be fantastic in a couple more months. The forest still has it’s winter brown on. Once it puts on its spring clothing, it’ll be beautiful!
I did find this beautiful blast of pink color! I don’t know what kind of plant it is. We saw lots of plants that look like rhododendrons, which are very common in Washington, but none of them were in bloom yet.
This was a neat overlook, with the falls on the left and the bridge that we went across down in the shadows on the right.
We had to walk along this highway bridge to get back across the river. This was kind of a neat shot looking back at it and of one of the dams.
It was a nice hike with some pretty scenery, and I’m glad we spent the time to explore. We encountered some very nice people along the trail and visited with a few of them for awhile. Being retired is great!
Time to go find the brewery. The Currahee Brewing Company was just up the road a few miles in the town of Clayton. This would be a nice place to sit if it was about 30 degrees warmer! It was only about 50 degrees and windy outside!
We bellied up to the bar, and we were happy to see that both Frankenstark and Kawi were on tap. One of each please! They were both quite tasty. The Frankenstark had a hint of clove! We both liked it, but more importantly, we had to get some to share with our Starkling kids, so we bought a six-pack to go.
While we were at the brewery, Kenny made more phone calls to RVOne and Sebring. It doesn’t look good for our time line. Well, he told RVOne that we’d pick up the window on Thursday, but we don’t know what we’re going to do with it.
When we got back to camp, he got online and did some research, and found a place in Clearwater that said something about quick service and they had good reviews. He emailed them since it was after 6:00, and we hoped that we’d hear something promising somehow, some way. In any case, we only had one more night here, then we needed to go somewhere, so we figured we’d head back to Florida and try to figure something out.
I found us a Harvest Host location in Northern Florida to spend the night on Wednesday night, then we’d probably have to take Nitro back to his Billy-Bob cow pasture on Thursday. At least we’re paid up through April 15 there. 😳
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3/15 Wednesday: We didn’t rush out of bed because it was only 34 degrees outside! We’d been hooked up to the water here, and all three mornings it has not worked. At least we had water in our tank. Maybe the hose was frozen or maybe they turn it off when temperatures get too low? Anyway, I made some coffee and was putting things away, getting everything ready to roll down the highway. Low and behold, Kenny’s phone rang at about 8:30, and it was a nice guy from the Clearwater RV place! They talked a bit and Kenny explained what our situation was. He said they could shuffle some things around and get us in Thursday afternoon or Monday! YIPEEE!! Kenny told the guy that we could have the window and the trailer there by Thursday after noon. WOOHOO!!! 🥳. Once the window was installed, the trailer would need to sit overnight so that the window would seat and seal properly, then we could be on our way. So it sounds like we’ll be headed west no later than Tuesday! YAHOOO! That wonderful news got us up and moving with a new purpose in life and spring in our step. 💃🏻🕺🏻 It was cold 🥶 outside, but at least it wasn’t windy or rainy. We got all hooked up and headed down the road.
After just a couple of miles and we saw a herd of deer on the bank by the road. There were probably a dozen of them having a leisurely breakfast.
It was a beautiful day for our 360 miles to Lake City, Florida.
This was our overnight spot. It was about 8 miles from the Interstate, and very quiet and pretty. It’s called “Yep! I’d Hit That”. They had some T-shirts and a book that could be purchased, or we could leave a $20 donation which is what we did. Kenny got out a step stool and tried to clean up the sticky plastic that we had over the window and fiberglass to help prevent leaking. The sun had really baked the plastic on, and he wanted to get it off of the fiberglass. He wasn’t as successful as he’d hoped… it was really baked on.
Thursday morning was chilly once again, but we were up and out at about 8:30. The sun didn’t even rise until almost 8:00! We only had 165 miles to RVOne in Tampa to pick up the window, so we’d still get there before noon.
This is a typical farm view in northern Florida – so pretty!!
We arrived at RVOne before noon. Kenny looked at the window, and discussed our plan with Ethan, the service manager. I don’t know if I told you, but Forest River only approved $886 for installation labor – which is what Sebring was going to charge. When we got short on time, we asked if we could have a Tampa place install it at a higher cost (near $1200), and we would pay the difference. It took awhile, but FR finally approved that idea. However, the Tampa place didn’t have time until mid-April, RVOne had no other options for us, so we found our own. Since we already had approval from FR to have it installed with a total that they would pay, we loaded the crate – standing up into Nitro’s kitchen, strapped it down, and we were out of there by noon.
It was about 45 minutes to Clearwater through Tampa traffic, and we arrived at Clearwater Motorcoaches. These guys were fantastic! They had us unhook Nitro, do the paperwork, they hooked up a forklift, and they were parking him inside by 1:30.
They immediately got the scaffolding around the front and started working! They got the fiberglass all cleaned up too. OH! And another thing happened. See the small window on the left? When we arrived here, it was hanging open! It’s one of those emergency exit kind of flip-open-from-the-bottom kind in our bedroom. The weather stripping was hanging, the frame was bent, and the latch was broken. 😵💫. We were fortunate that the glass was still there, and we were at a place where it could be repaired! They looked it over and gave us an estimate to fix that too. Geeze Louise!
I unloaded the freezer and refrigerator, took the bread, a few clothing items and bathroom stuff, and away we went back home for a few days.
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3/17 Friday: Clearwater called us around noon and said everything was done! Nitro has to sit over night, and the shop is closed for the weekend. They open at 7:30 Monday morning, so we can come pick it up after that. YAY!! They emailed the invoices, and the big window was actually less than the Tampa bid and part of that was cleaning the fiberglass! Alright!! And the side window repair was $300. Time for me to get out my pencil and calendar and make some reservations for our departure 2.0 on Monday!