Each day I find places to bird watch and/or visit, then move on to another state as my goal is to eventually arrive and visit family and friend in NY/PA area. Here were 5 days of travel with my goal of a daily bird checklist into eBird plus arriving to visit my friends and family:

A day: 

Walked Savannah, Georgia

Bird-watched at Tom Triplett Community Park in Pooler, Georgia

Harvest Host camping tonight

Next day: 

Bird watched at Caw Caw Interpretive Center in Ravenel, South Carolina

Walked Charleston, South Carolina and a delicious dinner at Henry’s-on-the-Market

Kampgrounds of America camping tonight

Next day:

Bird-watched at Wing’s Haven in Charlotte, North Carolina

Bird-watched at Ribbon Walk Nature Preserve also in Charlotte, North Carolina

Kampgrounds of America camping tonight

Next day:

Bird-watched at KOA I just stayed at.

Bird-watched at Virginia rest area when the rain stopped! Met Upper Peninsula Michigan person. (More to this story.)

Kampgrounds of America camping tonight & birded here too

Next day:

Bird-watched at a West Virginia rest area. Will it stop raining?

Hotel night!

Finally arrived to visit friends in New York State!!!  Wonderful to see friends not seen in a year. (A very real disadvantage my living on the other side of the USA, despite my love of where I currently live with my partner.) My friends did visit more birding places with me:

Chris and I hiked at Lime Hollow Nature Center, enjoyed lunch in Cortland, and relaxed at Summerhill Brewery for a beer! Great day with a friend!

On my way to visit other friends, I stopped at Fuertes Bird Sanctuary and hiked the Renwick Woods Trail in Ithaca, NY. Whoa …. windy day with tree branches breaking, falling and crashing! Yikes!! I literally saw it happen 2 times! On my way off the trail, I started talking with a young man only to discover he was a past Cincinnatus, NY student of mine while I was the junior-senior high principal there! Karl and I had a great conversation catching up on old times and to hear how he is doing now. Unfortunately I also heard of the death of a friend/colleague I had known from that school district. Life really is to short …  let’s live it now while we have one!

With my other NY friend, Sheila and I walked a trail at Bell Station Preserve, Lansing, New York, hoping to photograph wildflowers. She does fantastic drawings of flowers and needed good photographs to work from for her drawings. We may have been a week ahead of the real bloom …. she’ll be back to photograph more flowers and to great scientific illustrations of them!

After Harvest Host locations and talking with strangers, it was wonderful to talk with friends … people who have remained friends even with the distance between us. They each know me so well. This trip has many emotions wrapped within me and only my friends know the extent of those emotions. I was grateful to share time, thoughts and feelings with them. There is a safe place when with friends. A time to truly share deep emotions, some that often have bubbled within me at times and with no one to share them with … so visiting with these friends had been wonderful. In 4 weeks time, I will be heading home and appreciate knowing these friends are here for me if I need time to vent, be sad, share, or be with whatever emotion needs to be happening at that time. For now, I can appreciate them as the very good friends they have always been for me. Many, many thanks to my friends! Aren’t we so lucky to have good friends in our lives? I am very fortunate and can only hope they know how important they are to me. Thank you my friends.