Cane Boil and Fiddle Fest

Today we went to Gainesville to a Cane boil and fiddlefest. It was held at a historic farm area at a nature center there. What is a Cane boil? It is the process where they harvest sugar cane, shown growing here and turn it into cane syrup.

The stalks are cut, the leaves stripped off of them and the stalks are run through a cane press to squeeze the sap out of them. The sap is boiled in a big cane kettle that is heated with a wood fire. He is boiling about 50 gallons of of sap here and it will make about 6 or 7 gallons of cane syrup. They were serving home made biscuits (baked in a wood fired cook stove) with the syrup on them. Tasty!

What is a fiddle fest? Around the grounds were several small groups of musicians playing bluegrass type music. We wandered around for awhile listening to them.

There were also demonstrations of spinning and weaving.

Reed and Liam would have enjoyed the blacksmith shop with its operating forge.

Janice enjoying some music.

There is a cane press and a cane kettle here on the property where we are parked that is no longer in use, I will try to get some pictures of them because I didn't get a picture of the press today.

Monday we will be driving down to Lakeland, FL, about 3 hours from here to get the windshield in the motorhome replaced. It developed a large crack from bottom to top while we were in Georgia. They will replace it Tuesday and we will return on Wednesday hopefully. I have been enjoying the "work" here, operating a backhoe clearing several acres of brush and trees.

Melrose, FL

Yesterday we left our Georgia family and headed to Florida. We spent the night in Albany, GA and continued on to Melrose, FL today. We will be  working for a friend here that we worked with three years ago at the Ordway Swisher Biological Research Station. We are parked on a RV site on some land that he owns across the road from Ordway. We will be here until the end of December when we will move over to Ordway and volunteer for them until the end of March. We have a beautiful site here, will try to get some pictures tomorrow. Beautiful weather for travel the last two days.

A Walk in the Woods

We stayed home yesterday afternoon, so I took the opportunity to take a walk in the woods here in the park. The fall colors are beautiful and the weather was warm.

Georgia Life

As we near the end of our second week here, I realize that time has passed quickly again without me posting on here. I am having issues with transferring the iphone pictures to this computer, and my blogger ap won't work with the latest firmware upgrade on the phone, so long story short I have to transfer the pictures from the phone to Janice's computer, load them on a thumb drive and then copy to my computer. First of all I have a few from when we were in Alabama. There are a lot of nice hiking trails at the campground there with views like these.

To celebrate Vicki's birthday, we went to the Red Pearl in Birmingham. It is a Chinese restaurant and market. They have a lot of interesting foods for sale there like these ducks.

The next day was Saturday, so Phil and I headed to the Collinsville Flea Market. I love these big southern flea markets, so many things to look at. 

This has been a busy week at the soup kitchen where I volunteer. I have spent every morning there in the kitchen.

They have a really nice dish washing station that I use quite a bit.

Fixing collard greens.

Janice finished up a lap quilt for Mom this week.

We went to the library one day and picked up some more books that they donated for the library here at the campground. Someone had taken all of the ones that we put in it last spring. In my spare time this week, I installed an antenna on the roof for my 2 meter ham radio and installed a new cd/radio in the dash. Our old one finally died on the way down here.

Little Tallapoosa Park in Carrollton, GA

After a very enjoyable week with Vic and Phil in Gadsden (and way too much good food). We had to say goodbye and move to Carrollton today. We have one of our favorite RV sites here in the park and we will be here for a month. Mom's yard and garden here are looking very green still, but after a week in the humid 80s over in Alabama, the weather has turned cooler. After setting up the motorhome, we went over to Mom's for a short visit before coming back here to relax. I have upgraded to a smart phone finally, so I may be taking more pictures to post here since I will have a camera with me all of the time. (I know, my old phone had a camera, but the screen was small and the picture quality wasn't very good. Hope this one is better.) Still learning how to use all of the features on it and trying to remember them the next day.

Gadsden, AL

I'm a little behind in our daily travels. We left Bowling Green Wednesday morning and spent the night in Cape Girardeau, Thursday we went from there to West Memphis, AR. We had a spot in a campground on the river bank and spent most of our time watching barges go by on the river. Today was our longest driving day and we are in Gadsden, AL. We met Vic and Phil at our favorite restaurant tonight and will head over to their house tomorrow.
Here are a few pictures from West Memphis.

Heading South

We left Sioux City on Saturday and drove to Des Moines. Our daughter Sarah and her family have a convenient driveway with full hookups for the RV there. We spent Sunday with Andrea and her family and Monday with Sarah and her family. Lots of good food and fun with the families. This morning came way too soon and we had to say our goodbyes and hit the road.  We stopped for the night in Bowling Green, MO at the Cozy C RV Park. It is one of our favorites with easy access and long pull through sites. The owners are very friendly and there is a nice laundry room here.