Ghost Train! (and other things)

The first order of business today was house-stalking. My mom and I drove back out to the neighborhood where we had seen the two old, empty houses yesterday, and wrote down their addresses. Now, if you had an un-used empty house or two in a city with nearly no house market worth talking about, wouldn't you react positively to someone calling you up out of the blue and offering you a lump sum of cash to take the thing off your hands? Well, we shall see. Next thing we have to do is look up their contact info at the Property Appraiser's Office. We also found one cute house for sale, but upon looking it up online, it turns out that it's about ten grand over my miniscule budget. And while one might assume that a nicely remodeled interior would be a plus, I actually found the pictures of the almost "cutesey" interior a bit of a turn-off. So, I'm back to the notion of offering strangers money for their uninhabited crapshacks.

After writing down home-site addresses, we decided to head out to Kingfisher Landing, which is essentially a boat ramp giving access to the Okefenokee Wildlife Refuge. Now, as such, I didn't expect to find much of interest there... but then out of the corner of my eye, off in the woods, I spotted something old, large and made of rusty metal. So, I set off to investigate... and lo and behold: Ghost Train! Complete with ghost-tracks, heading out into the swamp! Now, aside from the fact that Waycross used to be a big hub for passenger rail transit, the Okefenokee was harvested for timber in the early 1900s, and rail lines were set down into the swampland for the purpose of getting the loggers in and the timber out. This was part of the remains of that old enterprise. We climbed all over it, and of course, I took pictures.

Riding the Ghost Train. I sat in the conductor's seat and fiddled with the gears.

Mom climbed up on the Ghost Train too

The front of the Ghost Train looked like the front of an old Ford truck

The rear view of the old train

Ghost Tracks, leading into the swamp...

Mom is going to be taking a friend out in the swamp in her kayak in a few days, and she had wanted to check out Kingfisher Landing as a possible point of entry. Unfortunately, while she had a guide-book to the Okefenokee that said use of Kingfisher Landing was free of charge, we got there and learned that you have to pay for a pass at the Okefenokee Wildlife Refuge main entrance, about 25 or so miles away in Folkston. We figured as long as we were there near the car poking about, we wouldn't have to worry about being ticketed or towed, but without a pass she couldn't very well leave the van there and go off kayaking about and expect to return and find the thing un-ticketed. So, we decided to head down to the OWR to find out about buying passes in advance. Once we were in the OWR (where mom ended up purchasing the year-pass), we decided that we ought to do some exploration there as well.

The first thing we saw was a very bold red-shouldered hawk,
who posed for some pictures.

Then we drove down to the Chesser Island Homestead (at the end of a long, windy road through the pine-forested swamp), which we explored and then walked several miles out to a tower at the end of a boardwalk overlooking Seagrove Lake in the center of the swamp - beautiful!

Chesser Island Homestead

Me, on the boardwalk through the swamp

Swamp-view

Swamp/lake view from the tower

Swamp/lake view from the tower

Me, overlooking the lake/swamp

Mom, overlooking the lake/swamp