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Sunday, November 11, 2018

Trip Starts but Cold Weather changes everything

Don’t bother looking at our first week plans. Everything has changed.

First, we always watch the weather reports to see what is the best travel day. We moved up our schedule to leave on Thursday morning 11/8 since cold, snowy, windy weather was forecast for the weekend, starting Friday. That was a good decision, Thursday was a bright sunny day. But, looking at the temperature and rain forecast for Galax, VA we decided we couldn’t do the planned bike trails.

Second, We stopped in Wytheville for the night so we could confirm the weather reports of a rainy Friday and head to the south of Ashville to get to warmer weather and hope Saturday would be dry. We found our batteries were almost drained overnight and we really hadn’t used that much power. Our batteries were 6-1/2 years old so I figured I would use the rainy day to buy new batteries. Problem, the closest place I could find that had Trojan batteries in stock was in Charlotte. So another schedule change, instead of heading toward Ashville, we headed to Charlotte. It rained hard all day and the traffic was terrible and it took almost 1-1/2 hours longer then planned. Got the batteries and also discovered that my Power Inverter had an internal short and would not give us any 120v power to watch TV.

Third, we still wanted to visit our friends Greg & Sandy in the SC high country, so our plans changed to drive over to Greenville, SC and stay overnight and on Saturday do a 20 mile bike ride on their well publicized Swamp Rabbit Trail. Saturday was dry & sunny but windy and temperature about 45oF. Peggy said, no way to a bike ride, so I spent the day on the internet looking for a new Power Inverter. The only place I could find a replacement was mail order and shipping would take 4 days from Monday. This won’t work since we will have left our friends by then and be heading to Augusta, GA where we biked last year, our next camping reservations were at Jekyll Island but not until Monday 11/19. So we may stop at another GA State Park after Augusta.

The weather this year has been miserable and they are now forecasting two more days of heavy rain and high temperatures 20o  below normal.

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