Trip Report Part Five

We never made it into downtown Savannah - the closest we got was driving by the stadium where the Savannah Sand Gnats play Triple-A baseball – but after a week, it was time to head west.  Our next stop was in Pine Mountain, GA at the F. D. Roosevelt State park.

The statue above is at Dowdell’s Knob, a place FDR was said to come often to sit and think. 

It is a nice park, but the only sites with 50 amp service were too small for our 37 foot 5th wheel.  We did get a nice 30 amp site with a view of a pretty little lake.

Down the hill from the park is the town of Warm Springs, and FDR’s Little White House, also a Georgia State Park.  We took the tour, and found it much more interesting than I actually expected it to be.

  Among the historical tidbits we learned – when Roosevelt learned that the light bill for the Little White House was over four times the cost of electricity for his Hyde Park mansion, he instituted the REA (Rural Electrification Administration) that led to low cost electricity for farmers across the country.  The docents did not discuss the rumors of FDR’s affairs, but did confirm that, while Eleanor almost never came to Georgia, his secretary  was always with him.

A few miles away, but part of the same facility, are the treatment pools that brought him to Warm Springs in the first place.  Polio victims would soak and exercise in the 88° water from the springs.

Just out the back gate at the other end of the park is Callaway Gardens, a nationally known destination that features a PGA golf course and a lake that was hosting the national water-ski and wakeboarding championships.  I might recommend visiting the gardens in early April, when their thousands of azaleas are in bloom, but by the time we got there, there really wasn’t much to see.

There were still a few azaleas blooming – enough to hint at how beautiful it must have been a month earlier.  They do have a very nice Butterfly House, but be sure you are well hydrated before you go in.  The keep both the temperature and the humidity inside somewhere in the upper 90s.

One more thing before we leave – not something I saw, but something I heard.  I had stopped for fuel just outside that back gate, and the 20-something clerk at the convenience store/gas station looked and sounded like a typical immigrant from the Indian sub-continent.  When I went back in to pay, he was deep in conversation with a local, and he sounded just like any other red-neck good ol’ boy  from the foothills of the Appalachians.