Check Your Nuts

 

St. George, South Carolina

For the past 7-10 days, the weather forecasters have been talking about the potential for a tropical storm coming into the Tampa Bay area.   No one was too worried about it being anything but a big rainmaker.  No one, except me, that is.  :)

The forecasters only gave it a very slim chance of forming into a tropical storm. 

Well, guess what?   It just became our first named storm of the season, and Tropical Storm Andrea is heading our way.

Last June Al and I missed our “window of opportunity” to leave town when Tropical Storm Debbie came in.  This year, we didn’t want to do the same thing, because one thing we have learned about hurricane’s and tropical storms, is that the forecasters are much better at predicting where they will go than they are at the strength they will become.   Tropical storms are known to spawn tornados and we really don’t want to ride one out in a motor home.  Better to get out of town than wait and see what forms, in our opinion.

So….on Tuesday, we left Tampa and made it about 200 miles north to Jacksonville, Florida, which is on the east coast of Florida just south of the Georgia border. 

On the way to Jacksonville, we ran into a few pretty hard patches of rain.   We had the windshield wipers on and all of a sudden, one wiper started flopping and going the wrong way.  We were afraid it would fall off, but were on the interstate and couldn’t stop. Al turned the wipers off and we drove without them.  Fortunately, he had recently put Rainx on the front windshield, so mostly the rain just beaded off and we could see to drive.   Not the best situation but it would have been much worse without the Rainx.

We finally found a place to pull over and Al jumped out to see what was wrong with the wiper.  Of course it was the one on the drivers side.  It turned out there was a little nut that was loose.   He tightened it up and we were good to go.

Or so we thought.

We drove a bit further, it started to rain pretty hard again, and the wiper started flopping around again.  So, off the wipers went again and on we went on the interstate with no windshield wipers!  It was nerve wracking, but we felt it was safer to keep going than to stop on the side of the interstate.  We could see, just not as well as we liked.

When we got to our destination it had quit raining finally and he got some better tools and tightened the nut a little better.

The moral of the story is to check your nuts regularly so as not to lose your wipers! 

We had planned on going a little further north to Brunswick, Georgia, but the wiper problem took the wind out of our sails and we decided to stop in Jacksonville, at Pecan Park Rv Park.  It’s a nice place to stop 2 minutes off the interstate.  They have all pull through concrete pads and it was perfect for an overnight stop.  We stayed there last fall along with Jim and Dee from Tumbleweed.

This morning, we got  up not really knowing where we were going to go, but we knew we needed to get further away from the Tampa Bay area.

We finally decided on St. George, South  Carolina, which is just outside of North Charleston.  We are staying at Jolly Acres Rv Park.   It’s a real nice little family owed campground that Sherry and David recommended last year, when we were running away from another hurricane! Thanks guys, we really like it here.   There’s nothing much around, but it’s a lovely little park and right off interstate 95. 

We just found out that Coastal North and South Carolina are in a tropical storm watch, so  it looks like we need to move a little further inland.

We may head west into South Carolina, or just keep going and going back to Asheville.

We have a lot of places nearby that we’d love to visit, it this darn rain and storm would just go away and let us play.  The entire southeast part of the United States appears to be wet.

 

And….to top off all my other problems, it appears that we have a couple of hitch hikers along with us.  We keep hearing little Green Tree frogs singing.  Al says they are outside, but they sure sound close to me and they give me the willies!  I think they are probably hiding in the vents or awning covers on the roof.  I hope they don’t find a way inside.