Re-Retired and Loving It

After nearly 10 weeks at Amazon, we put in our last shift last Tuesday.  Since then, we have had the chance to sit down whenever we like and the numbness is leaving our hands and wrists.  I am exaggerating only slightly.  What did we learn?  We are thankful that we were physically able to stay through the whole “peak season”.  We are also very thankful that we don’t have to do this kind of work on a regular basis. 

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 had a very nice Christmas, being invited to Jeff’s parents’ house for snacks and gift-giving on Christmas Eve with Pam and Ron along with Jamie, Jeff and their girls.

 

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!!