August
21-27, 2017
Second week
at Maumee Bay State Park, Oregon, Ohio
First order
of business after one week was to dump our tanks. In our years of travel we have only had to
use our gray boy a handful of times. It
took Monte less than an hour to dump all three tanks.
After a
heavy rain, Monte noticed water pooling up on one of our slide toppers. The stitching had come apart almost the
entire length of one side.
To fix it
Monte had to take the topper down. He gave the roof of the slide a good
cleaning along with the topper before using a strong epoxy on the seam holding
the spline in place.
I helped him
reinstall the topper by holding one side.
A couple of
days later, Monte decided to service the other two slide toppers on the same
side.
We drove
into Toledo where we enjoyed a couple of hours walking around the botanical
gardens.
The garden
is affiliated with the Metroparks of the Toledo area.
There are
over sixty acres of display gardens and plant collections.
The gardens
include some whimsy sculptures.
We began our
visit to the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge at the Visitor Center.
While we
were watching a short film, located near the information desk, we noticed
several people obtaining their Senior National Parks Pass. I overheard one of them saying that the cost
of the lifetime pass was going to increase from $10 to $80 next week.
Following
the film we toured the exhibits in the visitor center.
There is a
scope located on the second floor that offers a great view of the marshland.
On the third
floor there is an entire wall of mounted stuffed birds as well as an
observation deck.
As we began
our walk, Monte noticed a nest under the eaves of the restrooms. The mama flew in just as Monte snapped the
picture.
There is a
boardwalk along the marsh leading to several hiking trails.
Monte tried
picking up a bullfrog but it eluded him.
On our way
back to the campground we stopped off at Cedar Point NWR.
The property was donated to the US Fish and
Wildlife Service in 1965. It contains
2,630 acres and is the largest contiguous marsh on Lake Erie.
The Ottawa
National Wildlife Refuge Complex comprises three refuges; the Ottawa National
Wildlife Refuge, Cedar Point National Wildlife Refuge and the West Sister
Island National Wildlife Refuge.
The complex
totals more than 9,500 acres that include marshes, open water, wooded wetlands,
coastal wetlands, shrub/scrub, grasslands and an estuary that provides a home
for a wide variety of plants and animals.
West Sister
Island sits nine miles off the north shore of Ottawa NWR. The refuge was established by Franklin D.
Roosevelt in 1937 specifically to protect the largest wading bird nesting
colony on the Great Lakes.
The Island
hosts a rookery for great blue herons, great egrets, black-crowned night
herons, and double-crested cormorants.
The water around the island is too deep for the wading birds to feed so
they must make the eighteen mile round trip to the mainland marshes to hunt for
food to feed their young.
There is no
public access to the island.
For the past
five years we have used a Verizon Jet Pack for our internet access with no
issues. All of a sudden we began going
through data at an alarming rate. We
hadn’t changed our usage so we couldn’t understand why this was happening. Monte spent over two hours on the phone with
a Verizon tech trying to troubleshoot the issue.
They weren’t
able to figure out why we were using more data than usual but the tech did give
us an additional 10 gigs to get us through the remaining week until our billing
period reset.
The day of
the reset we logged onto the jet pack and did our usual morning routine of
checking emails, facebook and our bank.
Within one hour we “used” almost 10 gigs of data. Monte called Verizon again. And again they were not able to troubleshoot
the issue but did suggest we purchase a new jet pack as the one we had was so
old it could not receive any updates.
The local
Verizon store did not have the jet pack we wanted in stock. The checked other stores within 50
miles. None of them had the item in
stock so we ordered it. We also took our
laptops to the local library to get updates.
My laptop had 85 updates.
Yikes!
Our usage
has been normal for the last few days since activating the new jet pack and
getting updates for our laptops so now we don’t know if the problem was the jet
pack, the laptops or a combination of both.
On the next
to last night of our stay at Maumee Bay SP we enjoyed an evening concert at the
amphitheatre listening to Kerry Patrick Clark, a former member of the New
Christy Minstrels. He was occasionally
joined onstage by his wife and son.
It was a
beautiful evening with soft breezes from nearby Lake Erie and a perfect way to
end our wonderful two week stay in this gem of a park.
