One Christmas custom we were able to do, was to make lefse. We set up the electric griddle in the kitchen
and cranked out about 4 dozen lefse. We
shared some of it with Dave and also brought some to Christmas for Jamie. Yum!
We hosted a small brunch in our motorhome on Christmas
Day for Dave and Nancy and, also, Peggy and her son, Scott, from the Ashville
area. They are also fulltimers who have
been at Amazon, while staying in the same park.
Our next service project doesn’t start until after New Year’s
Day. We have booked 4 nights at the Life
Enrichment Center, a Methodist camp in Fruitland Park Florida to pass some of
that time. Now that we are recently
re-retired we figured we could stretch a 2-day drive to get there into 3 days
of driving, with another day off to get used to all this moving again. We left the Nashville area yesterday and
drove about 200 miles to a very nice Corps of Engineers facility on Allatoona
Lake in northern Georgia. A couple of
traffic issues made it a long day, so today is our day off. We will go through Atlanta on Sunday morning
and stop in southern Georgia for one night, and then get to Fruitland Park on
Monday.
The Corps of Engineers put a dam on the Etowah River to
create Allatoona Lake for flood control and electricity generation about 1949. We are about 30 miles north of Atlanta and,
as a result, the place is one of the busiest Corp facilities in the nation with
6 to 7 million visitors per year. The
following is taken from the Corps website:
“ As Allatoona Dam controls flooding downstream, large fluctuations of the lake elevation can occur. This is because the normal capacity of Allatoona Lake is relatively small compared to the amount of water that drains into it during heavy rains.
Daily lake elevation increases of three to four feet are not uncommon after
heavy rains. Weekly increases have been as great as twenty
feet. In the past, high waters have caused severe shoreline
erosion. To guard against this damage, engineers lower the lake's normal
elevation during the winter to provide storage capacity for spring rains.
This is when sudden heavy rain cause the most severe fluctuations. In the
summer when rainfall is reduced, the Corps of Engineers raise the level of the
lake to 840 feet above sea level. This is when the lake is most
beautiful, and when recreational use of the lake is the greatest.”
And we thought the Whiteface changed a lot during the year –
but nothing like this.
Here is what our location looks like, and notice the room to
catch next spring’s heavy rains.
We got a message from Nancy that they made it to
Florida. They took off their jackets and
socks as the temperature was 78. We can’t
wait!!
