Yep.. .we are deep in the heart of Georgia. If you are playing the home version of our game show, tonight's categories are: Agriculture, Coastal Geography; Forgotten Places and Natural Beauty. The first category is... Coastal Geography!
Well, let's start with where we left off yesterday and started today... Little Talbot Island State Park, Florida. When I posted the blog and pics last night I noted that it was storming. Well... it stormed all night. What I didn't mention is that our 18 year old Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier -- Kailey -- is along on the trip and that she is terrified of thunder. She shakes, pants, paces and generally carries on from the first clap of thunder until about an hour after the last. Nothing has helped her (including playing music, petting her, a Thundershirt and Valium... although we eventually concluded that the vet intended the Valium for Mrs. C' and me, not for Kailey since it didn't do squat for the dog). We also have the two year old Puggle -- Romeo -- along and he is mildly afraid of storms until he sees how Kailey reacts then he freaks out two by jumping onto the nearest lap or (after bed time) chest. It was kind of like "the farmer in the dell" in the Airstream last night. First the thunder... then the panting and pacing... then the jumping and clinging (Mrs. C' was the victim last night). When I awoke this morning I was unaware that the rest of my traveling companions had been awake much of the night and in distress. Here's a piece of advice... spend at least a few seconds upon waking to take the general pulse of the demeanor of people living with you in an enclosed space before you blurt out "Good morning, Darling! So... how was your sleep?". I'm just saying... I offer my life as a cautionary tale for others.
Back to geography. I mentioned that I thought the view around our trailer would be better in the morning light than it was at dusk. Here's the same pic I took last night, recreated in the daylight this morning:
So that's where we started. We had a great morning of reading, drinking coffee, watching the land crabs (which are about the size of a quarter, come in a range of colors and clearly number in the millions per acre at Little Talbot). About 10:00 we hit the road. Here's the view on the road out of the campground taken by Mrs. C' who hung her iPad out of the window to capture this to share with you:
Imagine the challenges faced by the earliest arrivals to Florida. That pic is only 1/2 mile from the beach and the dense undergrowth goes for miles. That type of forest is known as "hammock" in Florida. It's dense.
After the Yellowstone trip we decided that life on the road is better for us if we slow the pace a bit more. On that trip we moved 5 or 6 days a week (except while in Yellowstone) and did 4 driving hours on travel days. That seemed reasonable after the number of times we did the Maryland/Florida run in a day (932 miles took between 13 1/2 and 16 hours depending on time of day, day of week, weight of cargo, number of dogs and State Police density). After Yellowstone we plan trips with 3 driving hours a day and 4 or 5 days per week in motion. So, today we had the luxury of asking ourselves "what should we explore en route?". The answer came back: Amelia Island!
Amelia Island is just a stone's throw north of where we camped. It is the southernmost of the "Sea Islands" which form a chain from South Carolina to Florida. Amelia is the only Sea Island in Florida. You may know some of the Georgia and South Carolina place names including: Jekyll Island, Hilton Head, Tybee Island and the unimaginatively named Sea Island (hey... redundancy doesn't seem to have hurt New York, New York...). There are about 100 islands in total in the group.
If you had been a mucky mucky in the late 1800's or earliest part of the 1900's and you wanted to vacation in luxury in Florida you likely would have booked a visit to Amelia Island. It has preserved elements of that past and added many more. Our trip up Florida A1A on Amelia Island took us past luxury hotels, impeccably landscaped guard housed that kept the riff-raff out of uninhabited neighborhoods of oceanfront mansions and cute little shops clustered tightly to prevent the attack of discount prices. It was American old money on display in its fully restrained splendor! When we reached the north end of Amelia Island in the town of Fernandina Beach, FL we made a startling discovery... we've been there before! Don't press for details about why that was a surprise to us. It could be geographic ignorance (hence today's category... Coastal Geography) or the ravaging effects of years on memories... but at the north end of Amelia Island sits Fort Clinch State Park. That was the spot we stayed last October on the last day of the trip from New Jersey to Florida to bring our Airstream home. It's also where we will finish this trip in a little over three weeks... if you can hold on that long there will be info on that fort which still stands where the St. Mary river meets the Atlantic in the very north east corner of Florida. Our Amelia Island tour continued with a drive down the old main street of Fernandina Beach. It is now a very well kept stretch of about 6 blocks of brick building "from the day" that house restaurants, shops, boutiques, salons and such. Nicely done of its type. A block off this main street are many lovingly preserved homes from a century or more ago. The only place I can compare it to is Key West. The difference is Key West has an aura of free-spirit-meets-hardscrable-fish-camp while Fernadina Beach makes a nod to the golden age of American wealth while somehow not getting too Disney-esque. It looked appealing, but the journey ahead called so we pressed on.
The next category is... Agriculture! Even before we left Amelia Island we were exposed to the importance of Agriculture in the modern South. Log trucks. I have no idea why they outnumbered mosquitoes on Amelia Island (which isn't easy to do)... but they did. They were headed toward Fernandina Beach (which is also a rail center) full and back south toward Jacksonville empty. All pine logs. All full length. Few large enough to make meaningful lumber. I suspect they were headed by rail to pulp and paper plants. It was impossible to overlook them. The log trucks were evident for the next hour of so of the drive. The pine forests from which the logs were undoubtedly being harvested became even thicker as we headed out of Florida into southern Georgia. As the afternoon progressed we moved into cotton country then pecan orchards and eventually even saw tobacco growing in large fields. There's lots of sparsely populated space in Georgia. Much of it has been planted with one crop or another.
Now let's talk about.... Forgotten Places! If you've tuned in to this blog before you may remember that we like to seek out average places, even unheard of places (remember Cabool, Missouri or Buffalo, Wyoming? You're one of the few then!). Between that tendency to bushwhack and our general dislike of I-95 you can imagine that when Google Maps said "you can travel today for 100+ miles of I-95 followed by I-16 or you can take a series of state roads and it only takes 15 minutes more" we jumped at the chance to see America up close! In past trips like that we've stumbled onto places seared in the American memory. Places like Tuskeegee, Alabama; Elvis' birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi, the Oregon Trail in Wyoming; the infamous Confederate prisoner of war camp in Andersonville,Georgia; even Fort Hays, Kansas where Kevin Costner learned to dance with wolves. With that body of experience we knew we were in for a treat crossing Georgia. The places we visited today turned out to contain not a single recognizable town or place of obvious historic significance to either Mrs. C' nor me. (at this point, the reader is instructed to overlook the earlier comment about potential memory loss and/or geographic ignorance... dwelling on those comments will only serve to undermine the intent of the points that follow). We passed through the Georgia towns of White Oak (never heard of it), Hortence (sounds like a Mary Poppins character), Jesup (crickets), Reidsville, Collins, Cobbtown, Aline, and eventually our destination Twin City which isn't big enough to qualify as one city let alone two. Never heard of any of them. There wasn't a historic marker, place name or bypass that gave the slightest indication that anything noteworthy had ever happened on that 150 mile stretch. Nice places... for sure. Nice people.... you bet. On our one gas stop a fellow at the next pump who looked like he could have been a distant cousin struck up a conversation about the Airstream. I couldn't understand half the words that he spoke in Georgian. When he saw our Florida plates I think was sharing something about a trip he took to Daytona... but it might have been about the gas mileage he gets with his new transmission... I'm not sure. What a country!
And so our last category.... Natural Beauty! After meandering from the southeast corner of Georgia to here in the middle part of the state we arrived at George L Smith State Park. We found a nice camping spot. This park like most in the Georgia state system takes reservations but specific spots are chosen on a first come first served basis. We picked one with a stand of cypress trees at the back. Here we are in place:
What I didn't realize until I took my evening walk with the dogs is that the cypress swamp on which we are camped contains millions (ok... maybe hundreds of thousands) of cypress trees. They form a network so dense that you can not see through it. I leave you tonight with a picture taken at dusk about 500 feet from where we are camped.
Good night...
SC
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