Trip Report Part Six

After leaving FDR State Park, we made three short drives and three overnight stops on our way to Arkansas and the Crater of Diamonds State Park.

Our first stop was Oak Mountain (Alabama) State Park.  We had been there before, so we knew it was a nice park. Alabama’s largest state park, Oak Mountain features a golf course, a lake with a nice swimming beach and an equestrian center.  It is also the home of the Alabama Wildlife Rehabilitation Center with rescued raptors that can be viewed from the tree top trail.  For us, the star of that show is a rare albino turkey vulture – shunned by other buzzards, and with feathers too brittle to fly well, she has lived at the center for years. We were pleased to learn that she is still there, outlasting a normal buzzard’s life expectancy in the wild.

Our next stop was Tombigbee State Park, just outside of Tupelo, MS. Google Maps sent us on a complicated series of poorly marked county roads that made us wonder if we would ever find the park.  Once there, we realized that if we had stayed on the interstate for one more exit we would have had an almost straight shot to the park entrance.  It is a nice enough park, and Elvis fans will know that he was born in Tupelo.  His birthplace and the church where he first sang in public are part of a tour of the city.

Tombigbee is derived from the Choctaw Indian word for “coffin makers,” named for tribesmen who cleaned the bones of the dead and placed them in boxes.  The Tombigbee River starts in northern Mississippi, and the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway allows for barge traffic between Tennessee and Mobile Bay.  There is even a Tombigbee Lake and campground at the Alabama-Coushatta Reservation at Livingston, TX.

After leaving Tombigbee, we crossed the Mississippi at Memphis and spent the night at Delta Ridge RV Park in Forrest City, AR.  This is a small park with additional sites under construction.  Almost everyone there was just there for a overnight stop.  It is located behind a pretty good restaurant which I think is owned by the same man who runs the park.

Crater of Diamonds tomorrow.

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.

Trip Report Part Four

Almost everywhere we went while staying at Skidaway State Park required us to drive on Highway 204, and every time we did we passed a small unobtrusive sign that read Pinpoint Heritage Museum.  Our curiosity finally got the best of us, and we decided to go see what it was all about.  The sign for the entrance to the museum is even more well hidden than the sign on 204, so we actually saw all of the town of Pinpoint before we found the museum.

Shortly after the Civil War, a group of recently freed black men bought the town site and founded the town  of Pinpoint.  Their descendants still live there today in a small close-knit community with one cemetery and one church, the Glory of Eden Baptist Church.

They are all of Gulla-Geechee heritage.  When they speak to visitors they use excellent English, with a typical Georgia accent, but among themselves they speak Gulla, a dialect so incomprehensible to outsiders that it might as well be its own language.  If you ever read Pat Conroy’s book, The Water Is Wide, about his years teaching in a Gulla school, you’ll know what I mean.

The one industry in Pin Point was the A. S. Varn & Son Crab and Oyster Factory.  That business closed in 1985, and its buildings now house the museum.

The tour starts with a well-produced 20 minute video  that provides insight into the history and culture of Pinpoint.  They are proud of the fact that they are so close – If someone gets into financial trouble, neighbors will join together to pay their mortgage, and all adults can and do exercise the right to discipline anybody’s kids.

Their approach does seem to work; everyone we met seemed to be friendly, healthy and well educated.

You can’t take the tour without them bragging a little about their favorite son.  Pinpoint is where Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was born and raised.

Trip Part Three

Although most of our trip was carefully planned, we had three delightful surprises while staying at the Skidaway Island State Park. 

The first came when we learned that our daughter, Cheryl, had bought us a Mother’s Day dinner at the Driftaway Cafe.  Located just a couple miles from our campsite on Skidaway Road, the Driftaway features what they call “Casual Coastal Cuisine.”  The service and the food were excellent – their house salad, mixed greens with a home made balsamic reduction vinaigrette, was enough to make you come back again.

The second surprise came during our trip to Tybee Island.  We went there for the day for more great seafood and a dolphin-watching cruise – the surprise came later.

  After the cruise, we went to Stingray’s

We had been there in 2007, and had the best seafood we had ever tasted.  It was so good in our memories that I was almost afraid to go back, but the food this time was just as good. The surprise came when we learned that we came to Tybee on the day of the Annual Beach Bum Parade.  Residents and visitors line the street with trash cans and pickup trucks full of water, then the people on the floats and the people on the sidewalks shoot each other with an amazing variety of huge water-guns.

We took off early, before the festivities got into full swing, but still managed to get squirted a few times before we got off the island.

The third surprise was a place called Pinpoint, but I think it is worth a post all its own.

Trip Report Part Two

As much as we enjoyed it, it was time to leave Stephen Foster behind.  After all, even the park literature admits Foster probably never saw the Suwannee River  made famous in his song.

In the deltas just southeast of Savannah, GA lies Skidaway Island, home to huge, moss covered oaks, subdivisions full of huge, expensive homes, Georgia University’s Institute of Oceanography, and Skidaway Island State Park.

We had seen great reviews of Skidaway SP, but were still surprised.  Our campsite was a full hook-up pull-through site that was easily 100 feet long – we could (and did) park our truck in front or in back of our trailer with plenty of room to spare.  It is the first state park we’ve ever seen where full hook-up includes cable TV, and the quality of the signal was better than most commercial RV parks that offer cable.

We did a lot of sight-seeing while we were here, and we took one day off.  If you haven’t taken an extended vacation, you may not realize that – no matter how much fun you’re having – after a couple of weeks you will need some down time. 

From our base at Skidaway, we visited Wormsloe Historical Park,

This is the site of one of Georgia’s first plantations, founded by Noble Jones, who came over with James Oglethorpe in the early 1700s.  There are Jones descendants still living on the property, but most of the plantation is now an historical landmark open for tours.

The “Tabby Ruins” is the site of the original homestead.  Settlers kiln- baked oyster shell to get lime, which they mixed with sand, water and unbaked oyster shell  to make concrete blocks they called tabby.  It worked pretty well, because after floods, hurricanes and 300 years of wear, much of the foundation and walls are still standing.

 You can’t tell from the picture, but our tour guide – the young lady inside the blacksmith shed – did the entire two-mile trip through the woods barefoot.  She explained that she was being historically accurate because shoes of the day were expensive, very uncomfortable and only worn on special occasions.

That’s just part of what we did in the area, but I’ll pick up again here tomorrow.

Back Again

We’ve been back home for almost a week after spending May on the road.  We got back last Wednesday, and our 5th wheel trailer got back yesterday.  We had a couple of minor issues, and one potentially major one that turned out to be a false alarm, so we left our trailer at Terry’s RV Service on the way into town.

It was a great trip, and I would have shared a report before now, but Google Blogger has been having compatibility problems that were only corrected last night.

We traveled a total of 3,000 miles, but I kept the miles between stops pretty short – the longest was 257 miles, and the shortest was 150.

Our first stop was Frog City RV Park in Duson, LA – just an overnight on the way to Grand Isle State Park.  Grand Isle is a great park with excellent facilities – and the fish were biting!  We spent five days there before moving along.

Not everything was perfect – our TV antenna went up fine, but when I tried to rotate it, it wouldn’t turn and I ended up breaking it.

After Grand Isle, we spent one night in Alabama at Meaher State Park on Mobile Bay, and one at Torreya State Park in Florida.

Torreya SP is named for the Florida Torreya, which is also known as the Stinking Yew. It is a small park with large mosquitoes, but ok for an overnight stop.  We were able to buy a new TV antenna at a big RV store along I-10 in Alabama, and I installed it at Torreya.  The old one broke because when they were repairing our roof a few months ago, the tech had put so much Dicor sealant around the antenna it had locked it in place.

Our next stop was the Stephen Foster Cultural Center State Park, a  park on the banks of the Suwannee River in Florida.

It is a beautiful park with old oak trees, and it features the Stephen Foster Museum

  And a carillon that plays Foster tunes several times a day.

The tower was being refurbished, so we didn’t get to hear the bells, but that was the only disappointment.  It is a great park.

From there, we headed to Georgia, and I’ll pick up there tomorrow.

Not Just Me

Still can't post from Windows LiveWriter to my blog, but I'm not alone. A check of the help forum shows it's happening everywhere. Also seems to apply to Raven, and other blog composing software.