Chooo chooooooo!

Do you like trains? Barney likes trains. Dan likes trains. Jimmie and Annabelle don't mind trains. Do I like trains? Ask me in the morning. Its 10.45pm here in Okefenokee, swamp area of Georgia, USA. Yes, we've said goodbye to sunny Florida, and headed north to Georgia. At the moment we are only just over the Florida border. We are heading up to Jackson, to visit my death row pen pal, as I mentioned before. Okefenokee is a half way point between where we were, and where we are going. Okefenokee swamp is a 700 square mile area of swamplands and wildlife.

This morning we got up early, packed up our garden table, chairs and BBQ into the boot, and said goodbye to Pat and Jim (see photo) who have been lovely to us, and made the start of our trip so easy. We all felt a bit sad leaving them, not to mention leaving the comfort of their luxury RV resort!

The drive to Jackson would have been 7 hours of freeway had we done it one go, so we decided to break it into two trips and go the scenic route. Today we drove about 4 hours, but we broke it with various stops (breakfast in a supermarket car park, a stop at a fruit stand, and a visit to St Augustine). St Augustine is the nations oldest city! It was such a beautiful place full of the most amazing buildings. We really would have loved to spend a few hours there but we couldn't find anywhere to park the RV, so we enjoyed it as we drove through. We did manage to stop momentarily for the kids to visit the Pirate Shop though (priorities eh).

By 4pm we had found our RV park, checked in at reception, parked up and hooked up our electric, water and sewage. The guy at reception said to Dan "I hope you like trains!" Well, boy, if you like trains, you'd love it here. We are parked less than 200 yards from the busiest freight train line in America! The Folkston Funnel is just a few minutes away. There are approximately 70 trains a day (day and night) passing on this bit of track, all freight trains, all seeming about 6 miles long. We can see the trains from our RV window, and because they pass over a railroad just by us, each and every train has to blow its horn about 10 times on its way through. Oh boy, we may get no sleep for 2 nights! But Barney is loving running out to see how long the trains are.

Dan and Barney took a walk up to the track earlier on and Barney was given control of the camera. Apart from the photo with him in, here are some of the pics he took. The big spooky tree is in our RV park. It is covered in Spanish Moss. This grows freely on some of the trees here, a bit like ivy does at home. It makes the trees look kind of spooky and haunted. I love Barneys photo of that one. (It's worth clicking on that photo to see it in better detail). The second photos if of Barney covering his ears as a freight train comes through. The next is out RV parked up in the camp, and the last is our RV park from the train track. Not bad photos for a 4 year old.