Two more days in Batumi

This blog entry will include our last two full days in Batumi as well as our train ride back to Tbilisi on Monday evening.

Saturday we got out for a walk after having breakfast in the hotel.  They had a decent selection of hot and cold items so we managed quite nicely.  We wanted to walk near the shore, so headed straight out from the hotel to the waterfront.

 

You get four for the price of one in this shot.  A lovely dolphin leaping as well as the alphabet tower, ferries wheel, and the Chacha tower.  There is a lighthouse behind all if these things but just not in the photo.

We walked up to a park near Nurigeli Lake where we saw this interesting fountain.  There was enough water to give the illusion that the water was holding up the rock as one does not see the support inside the tower of water.  Pretty neat.

 

This lady on a bicycle is one of our favorite sculptures.  The water is forcing both the wheels to spin adding a sense of reality to the piece.  Marty has taken many shots of this piece during two visits to Batumi and when we return, she'll take more.

There are lots and lots of green spaces in the city along the waterfront.  And there are many gardens and fountains.  It is a great place to just walk and lots of people do just that.  Walk, sit, and enjoy. The city has many rent-a-bike stations throughout the tourist area, similar to ones we see in European and US cities, but that doesn't discourage competition from local entrepreneurs.

 

There is a small bird exhibition with ducks, geese, swans, peacocks and others and of course, with nice sculpture.  We have enjoyed the birds a lot and on Sunday we got a display by the Peacocks (two of them) most likely trying to look their best for the peahens in the yard.  You might ask, why? Why show the rear end of the peacock?  Well, for one thing you can see how his feathers have been trimmed to prevent him from flying off!  Also the feathers that are below the long ones.  We suspect that these more densely spaced feathers help to support the much longer ones.  At least, that's our speculation.

 

There are different varieties of peacock but we have no idea which this one is.  He was just strutting and showing himself off and all of us who were watching certainly enjoyed seeing both this one and the other male.  They were also vocalizing which made it not just showy, but noisy.

Near the bird enclosure is the Veterans Club.  On a nice day there are many older men sitting both inside and out playing a variety of card or board games.  Quite a nice place for them to be sure.

 

And there are gardens and landscaping everywhere in this part of the city.  This was just one of many large beds of flowers in full bloom.

 

Our dinners both Saturday and Sunday evening were at a restaurant called Heart of Batumi.  It is a wonderful small place with great food.  Nearly all the travel rating sites put this as one of the best restaurants in the city.  It is by far one of the smaller places as well.

Two servings of salad below.  The one of the left is the traditional cucumber, tomato, onion, salad with walnut sauce and the one on the right is the wonderful eggplant salad stuffed with crushed walnuts.

 

Below is the dish David had on our first dinner there (Saturday). It was even better than it looks in the photo.  

Breakfast Saturday morning was at a very tiny restaurant called The Chocolate Coffee House..  It was just a skip, hop, and jump from the hotel and we sat outside and enjoyed the cool morning air.  We both had omlettes of one kind or another and the food was excellent.  

Below is Marty's cheese omelette and the carrot side was slightly spiced with Korean type herbs and spices giving the dish a most wonderful exotic flavor.  We asked the owner about it and he said that they had Korean friends who gave them the recipe which they then toned down for the non Korean palette.

 

As we walked around the city we spotted a large fountain dedicated to Neptune.  This is a replica of a fountain in Italy, maybe Rome.  Neptune was okay but the mermaids on each corner of the base were what fascinated us,  Yes, the water is coming right out of the breasts of the mermaids.  We've never seen anything like this before.  Okay, little boys with water coming out of their penises but never water coming out of breasts.

 

 

Here's Marty on the roof top terrace of our hotel (President Plaza). The room was excellent, except for facing the street that became local hot-Rodders used late into the night to race back and forth.  

 

We couldn't resist doing a panorama from the terrace giving a nice view into the square and the nifty buildings that surround it.

As Monday morning arrived we both found ourselves not feeling quite up to snuff so after breakfast and a short trip out for coffee we remained at the hotel until it was time to go to the train station.  We boarded and since we had business class tickets, we were on the upper level of the two level car.  The car was numbered "4" and there was also a "3", "2" and "1" but the first car was 4.  We suspect that the train doesn't get turned around so the first and last cars are also "engines" and the car number order might be assigned based on departure from Tbilisi not Batumi.

 

There's David on the left in the blue shirt headed toward the doors of car number 4.  We rode on the upper level on the same side as what we had been on for the trip over to Batumi.  This is the same side we were on for our previous trip in 2014.  One of these days we want to see the other side's landscapes. This is a smooth ride for sure and although it takes five hours, it was comfortable and we have no complaints for having paid 26 GEL for business class or just under $11 one way.  Train travel in Georgia can be comfortable as well as priced very reasonably.

Batumi

We left Tbilisi by train on the 9th of June.  The train service is greatly improved now and we were very impressed to see a very modern train waiting for us.  Our car was the first one and was a double-decker.  We didn't know when we booked online just what we were getting as some options for trains and seating didn't seem to function on the Georgian Railway web site.  In fact, their web site is the most frustrating web site we have ever used in our entire lives!  No joke, not kidding.

Now back to the train.  It was wonderful.  The track bed has been improved so the train is nearly silent as it travels across the country toward the Black Sea and  Batumi.  In the mountains, which are beautiful, the train slows to 49 kilometers per hour or about 30 mph as there are many bends and curves and anything faster might not be prudent.  There was even wi-fi available and it worked most of the time we were on the train.  

There is no cafe service on the train so one must load up with the essentials before boarding.  Several women were on the platform selling cold water and snacks and the only thing they didn't do was  board the train to sell their goods.  It isn't that long a trip (five hours) so one can survive without bringing any snacks.

In about 2014 we had traveled to Batumi by train and when we arrived we were quite a ways out from city center.  Now the train goes all the way to the bus station making it more of a transportation center vs just train or bus station.  This station is just on the far side (more northernly) of the port itself.  The "getting into city center" was another experience unlike anything we've had before.  The taxi drivers are the most aggressive we've experienced and work with another person who starts hounding you as soon as your feet hit the platform!  Quite frankly, this was not the most pleasant experience.  You couldn't just walk away from them, they hung right on to you (not literally but figuratively) and at times blocked your forward progress.  Folks were also promoting "home stays" if you didn't have a hotel.  We wonder if this is because the economy in Georgia isn't the strongest and folks are willing to go a little further to get income than they might have at another time.  This isn't the high season either, that comes later in the summer when the temperatures in Tbilisi are blistering and no one wants to be there.

We did grab a taxi (with right-hand drive) and for 10 lari got to our hotel.  (Current exchange rate is about 2.4 lari to the dollar.)  Our hotel is the President Plaza and appears to be built around a casino (which isn't operating right now, or wasn't yesterday).  The lobby isn't like any we've experienced before.  There were just two desks with computers and a few chairs for seating.  Nothing that shouted "Hotel Lobby" at you.  We got our key and went to the room which is on the 1st floor (which in the US is actually the 2nd floor; over here the ground floor is floor zero).  The room is quite large and has windows overlooking a square surrounded by restored buildings and some new ones.  There is a lovely fountain in the center with nice plantings around the corners of the square.  All-in-all, the location is great and we are not complaining.  The photo below is obviously a panoramic view as the street is straight, not curved :-).

 

An interesting side note on the wi-if in the room is that each room has it's own wireless transmitter with the password being our room number.

Since we had not had lunch, we headed out for food after a short rest break and only made it about one block before selecting the BK restaurant.  We sat outside in the shade and ordered what turned out to be a very filling lunch of okroshka (a cold soup with hard boiled eggs, radishes, carrot chunks, yogurt, dill, scallions).  It is one of the most refreshing soups one can have on a hot day.  It was a very large portion and maybe we if we had known how large the portion was going to be we wouldn't have ordered the roasted eggplant with tomatos and cheese.  (Also shown below)

 

 

This eggplant dish was really interesting.  There didn't seem to be any added spices or salt.  It was grilled somehow and then the tomato slices added and the cheese nicely browned on top.  The eggplant was sliced in such as way that the cook was able to spread out three slices (still attached) in a fan.  This alone would have been a meal.

 

This is really a photo of Mary's cappuccino in which David just ended up.  

With our full bellies we decided to take a short nap before we headed out for some walking around.  After what had been a very short night's sleep the previous night in Tbilisi due to street/party noise near the Airbnb, it was 17:00 before we hit the streets again in Batumi.  That's just the way life can be when you are retired and jet-lagged.

We headed for the waterfront and watched some children playing on the beach.  Black Sea beaches are not sandy, but rather consist of stones.  We're not sure why the sea hasn't ground them up into sand as they would be in other parts of the world.

 

The water isn't the cleanest right near the port, but it wasn't stopping folks from swimming.  It was not water either of us would go in.

As we walked along toward the port area we spotted the Ali and Nino sculpture and it was moving.  When we had first seen this in '14 it was just on a concrete platform with no walkway around it and so seeing it yesterday with paving all around it and benches was quite a contrast to our first exposure to it.  

The two figures are constantly moving and because of their construction come together and then pass through one another to then repeat the rotation.  It is quite fascinating and there were quite a few people just watching and taking photos.  The sculpture is named after the characters in the book, Ali and Nino https://georgiaabout.com/2012/08/30/about-art-statue-of-love-in-batumi/ .  

Because of the walk, the heat, and the effect from yesterday's walk in Tbilisi, we decided to find a place to sit down and relax for a bit.  This turned into two beers and dinner while we watched the men who fished off the pier.

 

The fellow above had about six hooks on his line and was catching small fish about 3-4" in length.  We don't know if he was going to use them for bait for catching something larger or not, but after he had caught about 10 he packed up his gear and left.  Behind him in the photo is where the restaurant's grilling took place.

 

Imagine yourself being hot and thirsty...then wrap your hands around the cold mug of beer above and enjoy just as we did.

 

Not all of Batumi is flashy and bright with neon or moving signs.  There are still parts of the city that remind you of what it must have been like a 100 or so years ago.  Lovely small buildings with balconies overlooking the street.

So we will close with a view out the window just as we were headed to bed.

 

Day one in Tbilisi

We arrived at the Airbnb in Tbilisi around 04:30 and went to bed around 05:00.  Fortunately the street noise was minimal and so we were able to get some rest.  Around 11:00 we ventured out to find breakfast at one of our favorite local restaurants on Agmashenebeli feasting on scrambled eggs with cheese and smoked salmon on dark bread and a cup of cappuccino.  Total for the two of us was around $6.  We spent a lot of time walking around and checking things out.  

 

This photo shows one half of the large room we had for overnight lodging.  Two beds; one behind David and that sofa and one beside Marty from where she took the photo.

The first thing we noticed on the street was the fresh fruit, in particular the cherries from eastern Georgia!  Red, pink, and yellow cherries.  Lots of other fresh fruit is currently available and that's a real treat since no fresh local fruits are available right now in Maine.

 

We connected with Bev McAloon and her friend Fran for dinner with our shared Georgian friend, Maia.   It was a khinkali dinner with traditional salads followed by ice cream after a short walk in the old city.

 

We headed for the cable car on the other side of the river so we could ride that up near the statue of Mother Georgia and get an even nicer view of the city.  Over by the base station there was a festive atmosphere created by the presence of many tamed animals and birds.  There were monkeys, parrots, at least one tamed hawk and a peacock.  People were taking photos and having their photos taken with and near these creatures.  The thing that most interested Marty was, however, a new sculpture of a tree which appears to be constructed with the use of found objects or recycled ones such as stove doors.

 

Maia had never ridden on a cable car and found the experience both scary and wonderful.  The late afternoon/early evening lighting was wonderful.   

 

We all enjoyed the trip up, albeit too short and too quick!

Once at the end of our ride we headed toward Mother Georgia where we had quite a musical treat.  Right beside the sculpture there were two men playing music.  One was on the violin and the other on the accordion.  The music fit the environment and many of us stopped to listen and just take it all in.

 

 

Mother Georgia stands on a ridge high above the city and we got wonderful views from there.  After a bit of searching, we found a set of steps that wound down along the face of the ridge, finally passing by the beautiful old Bethlehem Church and ending at Asatiani Street near Maia's house.   On our way down past the church we passed a lively small rose garden.  Below is a sample of the blooms.

 

Because Georgia does experience the occasional earthquake as it did earlier thus week, we discussed the visual evidence of prior damages.  This photo shows the extreme level of external support we have found,

 

 After goodbyes, we four travelers headed back to our beds for a well-deserved rest.  David and Marty found that they couldn't block out the music and party noise from shops on nearby Agmashenabeli and therefore got little sleep. 

And so it begins again

Here we are in Logan airport waiting by our gate and since our last international flight we now are in seats where every seat has either an electrical outlet or USB connection.  There are also counter top arrangements as well with multiple plugs available!  Last year we did not see these at all.  Since our world is so plugged in this somewhat makes sense.

 

There was supposed to be greater security or more security procedures here but we didn't experience anything that seemed different to us from previous trips through this airport.

Tha flight was not quite full and there were only a handful of screaming tir d children, however, they all seemed to go to sleep quite quickly.  

 

Oh first stop after getting of the airplane was one of two Starbucks where we could access wi-fi and good coffee.  We sat and drank our coffees and emailed and downloaded stuff for almost two hours and then were either just walking around, sitting, or napping.  We had eight hours to kill and David and Marty decided to stay at the airport with our Maine friends who accidentally ended up on the same flight with us.  Since they are not going to o have enough time to go into Istanbul on their return flight we decided we would also kill time with them here and do our into the city bit when we have closer to 20 hours between flights.

This airport just gets busier and busier and one sees so many people from other countries and cultures.  It is not boring to people watch.  Some of the "native" different clothing we saw today was from Turkmenistan.  Women in very colorful long dresses with very interesting head coverings.  There was no way to discretely take photos but I did get a few which I will try to share if I can figure out how get them from an Andeoid phone to the IOS iPad.

It is easy to lose track of actual time when you are dealing with an eight hour difference between the east coast of the US and Turkey and then add one more hour for Georgia putting us nine hours ahead of home.  When we arrive early Thursday on Georgian time it will be 18:35 on Wednesday for our family and friends reading this.  We will have been traveling for roughly 29 hours door to door.  We have been eating every five or six hours so our bodies have no clue where they are.

We are staying in an Airbnb for about 26 hours between arriving in Tbilisi and taking the train to Batumi.  It is a very interesting place, one very large room with two queen sized beds at opposite ends of the room.  Here is a photo of David sitting mid room. Marty is standing by bed one near the door  bed two is behind David.

 

We didn't get a whole lot of sleep that first morning, but it will get better.

Headed to Batumi today-Friday.  Will write about our first day in the city while we are on the train.

Juniper Springs, Ocala National Forest

We arrived on Wednesday afternoon after a very windy drive up from DuPuis.  We bypassed Orlando and came up by Daytona on I-95.  Then across to mid state on Florida 40 and were surprised to see some Sand Hill Cranes right by the road.

This new campground is run by the Forest Service.  We were very pleasantly surprised to find paved campground roads and paved sites.  The bathrooms are large with showers and a dishwashing room.  The added benefit of this park is a warm spring pool.  In a word, pristine.  Our camp site is surrounded by tall pines and palmetto palms.  There are lots of birds too.

 

 

Our first morning we awoke to 31 degrees!  Ouch, we thought we were Florida not Maine.  It did warm up into the 60's or high 50's and the day itself was beautiful with absolutely clear skies and only a light breeze.  We got out for a walk on the Florida National Scenic Trail in the afternoon and it was really lovely. The entrance for us was right off the campground trail.  This is quite a long trail and as we walked we saw where people had overnighted in the woods.  Mostly a sandy trail sometimes with a little sugar sand (that's the deeper sand that is impossible to ride a bicycle through).  We saw Scrub Jays and Red-Headed Woodpeckers, but not much else for birds and wildlife.  Nonetheless, it was enjoyable.

 

 

This impressive sign was several miles from the entrance onto the trail.  A little bit of a surprise to find it where we did!

Friday morning it was again 31 and time for us to put the heat on in the camper again.

Friday we got our kayaks up to the launch area and wheeled them nearly 400 meters along a raised board walk to the water.  The campground provides "carriers" for canoes and kayaks, however, they are oversized and too wide and just didn't fit our boats at all.  We managed though and even though there was a misfit, we were grateful for not having to carry the boats by hand.

This canoe/kayak run is ranked in the top 25 in the country by Reserve America (the reservation service used by national parks and other national facilities.  We were looking forward to this activity which they said would be a 3.5 to 5 hour trip.  For us it was just over 3 hours of banning our paddles into the overhanging vegetation, bumping into stuff because we just didn't get our boats oriented properly between one tight bend and the next.  We had initially questioned the "intermediate" difficulty status the run was given but in the end agreed that it had been.

Below are some of our photos from the paddle.

The group shots were at the takeout point and the one below early in our paddle down the stream.

 

 

The number one wildlife creature we saw was the turtle!  Lots and lots of them and some really big ones.

 

At times the stream opened up and we got lovely reflections of gnarled trees and overhanging vegetation.

Near the end of the paddle there were thistles growing near the water and the butterflies were very busy.  Marty had to nose her kayak into the plants and fight the current to get the photo below.

 

We pulled our kayaks out of the water and checked our watches.  We would have less than 15 minutes to wait for the shuttle to come and get Paul.  The park service contracts out many of it's services and the canoe, kayak rental is one of them.  Along with the rental comes a shuttle service that will pick you up at the end of the run.  A nominal fee of $10.60 (per person) gets you returned to the parking lot where you can get your car or truck.  We used only the transport service for Paul as we would then load up all four kayaks and make them ready for the return trip to Maine. 

While waiting we chatted with a family from New Brunswick who said we should come to Canada and paddle in the ocean near their home!  Who knows, we just might do that once day.  

Our camping will now be limited to one more park with an overnight and then on to visit family and then home to Maine.

DuPuis Revisited

We went back to DuPuis Equestrian Campground, Friday March 10, after five days at Wekiwa Springs.  Such is life when you try to register very late in the season complicated by school vacation/college break time down here.  We were told we had FCFS status, but there were no campsites available so back down to DuPuis we came as all we needed was a new permit.

We arrived to find the non equestrian campground nearly empty in comparison to what it had been when we left.  Our Canadian friend, Marc, was back as well, so we pulled our campers right back under the very same trees we had been under before.  The difference was that this time there were lots of horses here whereas before we had only a few.  (Asked a lady Saturday am and she told us that there were 12-14 horses from "their" barn down for a weekend of riding.)

Our first question to Marc was, is the owlet still here?  His response was "yes", but he is now living in another tree across the campground road.  We looked up and sure enough there he was.  As we were sitting having our social time, a red-shouldered hawk came screeching through above the tops of the trees and landed in the very top of a nearby pine.  Marc filled us in on what was going on.  It appears that mom and dad great horned owl stole the hawks' nest and took it over.  There was quite a battle over the nest and the owls being much bigger won the battle.  The hawks have neither forgotten nor forgiven the owls for this and on occasion come in on the attack.  The young owlet however, is larger than the hawk so it may be more show than anything else.

In the collage below, the top photo was taken just six days before the photo from Friday afternoon.  Quite a bit of the fluffy baby feathers are gone from the chest and the face just looks older.  There were longer tail feathers and it appeared that his wing feathers were also longer.  We'll have four more days here to watch him/her grow and maybe fledge while we are around to see it.

 

The owlet fledged last night!  He or she is gone today.

The DuPuis campground is next to a highway (Florida 76) that large trucks use to take sugar cane from the fields to the refinery.  Also, many of the old cane fields are now sod farms, so we see (and hear) many trucks carrying huge rolls of sods.  For the most part, the weekend was more quiet, but the truck noise goes late into the night and starts long before daybreak.

There are two large cemeteries near the campground.  We have now ridden down to explore one of  them.  In the cemetery there is a mass grave containing about 1600 bodies of individuals who died in this area as a result of the hurricane of 16 September 1928; another 700+ are buried near Palm Beach.  This was a storm that came in off the Atlantic hitting the areas near Jupiter Lighthouse and then came across the state.  The levee on Lake Okeechobee's south side failed and this is where the deaths primarily occurred.  There were potentially 3000 individuals who perished many whose bodies were never found.  If you go on to the Internet you can find all sorts of information about this massive storm.

Sunday we decided to go to the rodeo in Okeechobee - the Okeechobee Cowtown Rodeo.  It was the first rodeo for us and so quite interesting.  Marty didn't take her big camera with a proper lens for shooting any distance so the small camera had to do it all.  The photos capture the spirit of the event from bull riding to the rodeo clown and bronco busting.  There was even a children's event of mutton busting that had us all laughing at the little kids trying to ride the sheep.  The bigger kids knew you had to wrap your arms and legs around and hang on tight!  As for the adults riding bulls and broncos, they were pretty impressive as these critters would buck up into the air and change direction at the same time.  Pretty impressive.

 

 

 

We have now paddled on the St. Lucile canal which runs from Lake Okeechobee to the Atlantic Ocean.  We accessed the canal from Indiantown which is just east of the campground by about five or six miles.  It is a small community with both Native Americans and a sizeable Hispanic population.  There are several really nice parks and in the park from which we launched our kayaks we saw Sand Hill Cranes just walking in the grass very much oblivious to our presence.  We also spotted another Limpkin which was pretty neat as prior to this sighting it was only Marty's.

 

We have done more biking in the park and found that even the car roads sometimes have more loose sand than we like to peddle in so on Tuesday when we went for a ride we did end up coming back via the highway.  We have seen lots of birds in the park, grackles a plenty but also got a rare treat on Tuesday afternoon when we walked over to a small pond and managed to see four red-headed woodpeckers.  Didn't get a good shot, but will share one with you any way because they are just such beautiful birds.  These are not birds we see in Maine, however, Marty grew up in Michigan where they are often seen in the summer time.

 

We were surprised to see a Kingfisher come into the pond as well.  We had seen these from a distance when paddling but never just resting in a treetop.

 

And there was a red-shouldered hawk hanging out for a short time as well.  We think that once he became aware of us he just wanted to head out.  It was pretty windy so the hawk was using it's wings to keep itself balanced.

 

Wednesday we head north to Ocala National Forest and Juniper Springs Campground.  From there we'll head toward Charleston, SC and then to the Outer Banks via a ferry and then work our way to VA and then up to Maine where they are dealing with yet another winter storm.