Month: December 2023

Thank you to everyone who followed and visited our blog in 2023. We had an interesting year getting settled in the much smaller house we moved into late December 2022. We finally did a long overdue significant downsize, in living space and in storage space. It took us until July to clear out the storage unit we rented “temporarily” as we made hard decisions of what to keep and what no longer fit our life. Those hard decisions worked and we did not find ourselves missing anything we gave away or discarded. After months of arranging what we kept, living with it for a bit, and then re-arranging, I’m happy to say we are about where we need to be with the house. We love our new neighborhood. Neighbors are friendly and keep an eye out for each other.

We also traveled more and longer, taking advantage of the ease of closing up our smaller house. We explored more of the southeast US in our motor-home, finding fascinating new places to visit and photograph. Midnight, our cat, settled into both the smaller home and the extended RV travel very well. Sometimes when traveling it seemed she would almost prefer we went smaller and moved into the motor home!

Professionally we re-assessed where we are now with our photography and how the world of photography changed especially over the past few years, and feel excited about the possibilities. Our naturalist work slowed as fewer opportunities working on projects with local park and preserves became available, so we decided to expand our scope and create more of our own opportunities.

We have a lot of short and long trips planned for 2024. One of our goals for this year is stay longer in each place we visit, rather than a few days and on to the next destination. We already planned to revisit a few places where we wished we had stayed longer on our first trip.

This blog continues and we hope you still visit us. My goal is still to publish every Wednesday, though life and travel do interfere sometimes.

We wish you a very Happy New Year!

We spent a few days at the Festival of Lights at Stephen Foster State Park in White Springs, FL as we do every year. I’ve posted photos in years past, and many of those same lights are still there. Two new ones caught my attention, Reindeer School, above and Santa with a sleigh pulled by that most iconic of Florida reptiles, alligators, below.

Very Happy Holidays to everyone. Karl and I are looking forward to 2024 and continuing our photography and travel. More about that next week…

I often mention our RV trips, starting in 2010 with a very used 10-year old van camper, and after several iterations of other RVs our close to perfect Itasca Reyo 26′ Type A, 12 years old but the ideal vehicle and layout for us. Our usual trips last 14 days or less, and usually involved traveling between a couple of places. We decided it was time to see if we liked living in that 26′ for a longer period of time. So, we left October 8 and explored mid-south Georgia for a month, planning to stay at least a week in each place. In spite of a tow car breakdown requiring us to slightly re-arranging our travel plans by a few days just one week out we found it a comfortable way to travel and live. Midnight, our initially reluctant traveling cat, seemed quite at home this trip, even she liked the new relaxed pace and adapted well to living in the RV.

Of course this meant much more initial planning than usual since we had family coming into town and had to be back in early November. We give precedence to state and local parks for the natural settings (about what you would expect from two naturalists and nature photographers), but where not available we booked private parks. That led to the discovery of Four County RV Park in Danville, GA. This small, family run park in the country is only 30 minutes from Macon, and we loved it from the start. I walked the pond each morning, and all the photos in this post came from those walks. A hiking trail is under construction along with other improvements. The sites are open for the most part, but spaced, and of course full hook-ups. The couple who own the park are nice and very helpful, and we enjoyed several long conversations with them on the park and their plans for the future.

Short trips will remain a part of our life due to other commitments, but from now on we will be searching for times we can take off and live the nomad life, if only for a month or two.