And it’s time to go.

It’s March 14 and we pull out of Topsail Hill Preserve State Park. We have been here for two weeks. We are slotted to spend the next two weeks up on the Georgia border, but even Gerard, who wanted to put down some roots is thinking it’s too long to stay. There are so many places to see and explore. 

Topsail camp site

We certainly took advantage of our full hook-ups at Topsail. For the non-rver readers… that means we can hook to electricity, city water and we have a sewer connection. At this park there is also cable and a swimming pool. Pretty plush. For us, full hook-up means it is time to do a little maintenance. We have yet to sanitize our fresh water tank since this trip has all had water hook up. One morning I woke up and thought, wow, we have our own sewer here… let’s take advantage of the convenience. We fill the tank with 30 gallons of water, adding 3/4 cup bleach and let it sit overnight.  I filled the gray and black tanks with this water the next morning and then emptied it all. So everything got a good rinse out. Then we filled the fresh water again rinsing it out one more time and voila! Any residual food particles in the grey tanks gone and I bet the sensors in the black tank are free and clear now also.

We enjoyed the time here, grateful for a site with internet, but I will be looking forward to more serenity in our next landing spot. It is spring break season and there are just a LOT of people here on the coast.

We drove northwest and quite noticeably we lost the palm trees. The drive felt an awful lot like Highway 2 in Wisconsin. We are now in Three Rivers State Park in Sneads, Florida on Lake Seminole and on the Georgia border. We are right on the line between central and eastern time zones. Officially, it is central time, but our phones say eastern. We are a couple miles off the road, so just  a  few trolling motors on some boats and birdsong…. ahhhhh so quiet.

Georgia on the other side. View from our bed at Three Rivers State Park

My first hike this morning had us winding between majestic pines. Spring and wildflowers are in abundance. All along the trail are trillium and white lilies. The trillium makes me think of Minnesota, but as I write this, Duluth is having a blizzard. No Trillium blooming there yet and I have to admit I am enjoying sundresses over parkas.  The pine forests differ significantly here as there is Spanish moss dripping everywhere and magnolia trees are interspersed through the woods. The magnolia tree is oldest recorded flowering tree dating back some 70 million years. This tree was used to set the classification system for all other trees…. oh the things you learn on these ventures.

 

Today will be toasty.. 87º. Finally, warm enough to be in the water and there is no going in the water here….gators reside! 

Gator swimming

If the forecast holds true, this will be our first time having 3 days of steady rain. I am glad we have the car at least we won’t be cooped up. We would like to go to Florida Caverns where we can tour the underground rooms of stalactites and stalagmites, soda straws, flowstone and draperies. Mammoth Caves it probably isn’t, but it will be a diversion from the thunderstorms.

How wrong can I be! Florida Caverns gives Mammoth Caves a run for its money. It was spectacular. The formations in the cave are every bit as spectacular as its Kentucky rival. 

inside the cavern

The tour is half the price of Mammoth and the trails above are a fairy wonderland, winding through landscape like no other. Margaret O’Neal, our new wanderer friend, and her dog Max met Sitka and me at the state park. We had just come off a night of heavy rain and thunder and lightening and storms threatened throughout the day so what better than to plan an underground excursion instead of sitting inside the campers. Rain stayed at bay and we meandered along the Bluffs Trails passing several cave entrances and clinging to crevice-filled limestone, Easter lilies and columbine were in bloom and we just missed the trillium. Lichen and moss and the rock formations had us believing we would surely see wee fairy folk.

 The day before Margaret, Gerard and I discovered an amazing local café in the town of Chattahoochee. Rutabaga Café is a tiny cottage tucked in a two house street. I was simply not  prepared for how incredible the good is here... to die for…creative menu, enormous portions and reasonable prices. Oh, and to hear the locals give this place praise is something. A few people stopped by our table and shared a number of stories about this town. We were told that people can order 7 nights of dinner to go! Well, we loved it so much we are having dinner there tonight. We may be eating at this wonderful establishment a few more times before we leave the area because our RV woes are not done yet.

Margaret and Gerard

Karma, karma, karma chameleon

same guy, different color

Yes, we have another problem. The morning after the thunderstorms, I rolled out the awning to dry it out and clean off the debris, we quick rolled it in when the storms started.  Knowing it was going to rain all day again, I went to roll it in and NADA, zippo, zilch… no power to the awning. What makes this a big deal is that if we get winds we have no way to get the awning stored. And I suspect we will fill the gray water tank and black before the weekend is over and we will need to move the van to go and dump and we can’t drive it with awning out! I am grateful, this time, we didn’t need to be on the road because we are here for the next 7 nights. Roadtrek has authorized us to get yet another mobile RV repair service, but in these dem, der woods, no one works on the weekends. When we go into town for dinner, we will pick up some paper plates and start using the campground bathrooms….argh! And that is not the only thing. The cO2 detector goes off randomly. I truly don’t get why this is happening to us and always on the weekend. I am not ready to give up yet. I love being on the road…. I just want it all to work.

No one ever did come to help us get the awning in. We, finally, got through to Roadtrek and they walked us through a manual awning retraction…whew…I was just imagining it being ripped off by the winds and what a mess we would have been in. The upside to many of these issues is we are learning how things work and will be more intimately knowledgeable about our systems and components of this home on wheels.

So, we were able to pull away from Three Rivers and make our way back down to the Gulf for one night in the pouring rain. As luck would have it, the rains let up enough to drive through St. Mark’s National Wildlife Refuge–one of the prettiest drives on this trip. It looks much like the Everglades and at the end of the road is Florida’s second oldest operating lighthouse. Sitka and I did a short hike before a torrential downpour drove us back to the car and the rains never let up. The rest of the day had us confined to the ZiOs mobile.  Tomorrow, we head inland and into our last week of the trip. We will land at O’Leno State Park not far from Gainesville. I have not thought much of spending time in the center of the state. I always think coast, coast, coast. However, the Old Florida has certainly surprised me with its beauty and serenity. The contrast of the extreme poverty and the enormous wealth always astounds me. Sometimes, I wonder whether or not I can truly make this place called Florida my forever home.

“Traveling- It leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”- Ibn Batutta