Record Breaking Temperature

 

Blairsville, Georgia (high 47, low 23)

It got down to 18 degrees this morning.  Not exactly record breaking for this area, but record breaking for us.  We haven’t seen this kind of temperatures since we lived in south Georgia.  

We survived the night, snuggled under our electric blanket, but it was hard to crawl out of bed this morning.

There were about a dozen birds waiting for Al to bring out the feeders this morning.  He takes the feeders in at night to prevent attracting any bears.   Now the birds seem to be coming form everywhere.  We’ve seen more varieties this morning then we have all summer.

The farmers finally harvested their corn and soy beans during the past few days.  The deer liked the soy beans, and our local bear spent every night in the corn field.  We feel really bad for them.  We assume the corn is being used for feed, because it has been brown for months.  The bears will have to find another source of food.  Poor things.  I was hoping they were going to leave some for the wildlife.  Should have known better.

We finally got the cabin ready for winter.  We figured we had better winterize the washing machine, which was a new one for us.  Although the cabin in well insulated, we didn’t want to take a chance on having anything freeze up, so we spun out all the water, and drained all the hoses.  For good measure, we ran some RV anti-freeze through it as well.

The water heater in the cabin was a different issue.  For some reason, previous owners plumbed the water heater by running PVC  pipe out the drain valve of the water heater, directly into the sewer.  So there is no way to open a spigot and drain the water and flush out the tank.   That made it a challenge to get the water out of the water heater and pipes.  Al ended up using his little wet/dry vac to blow water into the water spigot outside, and when we opened the pressure relief valve, the water flowed out.   I’m making note of this here, so that we can remember how we did it next year.  :)    We’re hoping the water is all out of the pipes.  I guess we’ll know next summer.  The people we bought this lot from never winterized the water heater and didn’t know how to drain the water.  Evidently the first owners are the ones who came up with that creative way to install the water heater.  The people we bought it from never had a problem, so perhaps the way it was plumbed allowed the water to drain from the pipes.  We were more worried about the pipes than the actual water heater.

It’s amazing how settled we got here during the past three months, so now we’re having to move back into the motor home.  The longer you are at one spot, the longer it takes to leave.

Al just got the hot tub drained and covered, so the big things are done.  The golf cart needs to be moved into the shed on the other lot.  We bought a trickle charger to keep the batteries charged. 

We are thinking of leaving tomorrow (Thursday), but Al is kind of voting to wait until Friday.  It will be a little warmer Friday morning for the last minute preparations like hooking up the toad.    Whatever day we leave, we plan on unhooking everything but the power and being ready to go with as little outside prep to do as possible.   We wanted to leave on Sunday, but since rain is predicted, we decided to leave earlier…….  I guess we’ll see how it goes today.