Oklawaha!

I’m going to have to work hard to catch up now that we’re in Naples.  I was going to squeeze 3 days into one but this is just too hard.  This ends up being all I can do after today’s very rough trip — from Wednesday the 13th.

We left Statesboro about 11am after spending a lot of time chatting with our neighbour Jean.  She and her husband Joe are recent “full-timers”; In November they sold their house, voted in Pennsylvania for the last time and hit the road to Statesboro. Jean has retired from education and Joe is an electrician working on a major nuclear power project up the Savannah River near Waynesboro.  They have a little dog Zuzu who was in love with our dog Swiffer; Dogs are major icebreakers in the trailering world it seems.  It is one of the key unexpected pleasures of the RV lifestyle — you can live in a suburban neighbourhood for years and learn nothing of the folks next door.  In trailering you can meet people and be sharing a beer with them minutes after pulling into your spot. Fun for me as I’m not normally gregarious or quick to make friends.  In three weeks they’ll leave Stateboro, head to the Keys and then west to see their daughter in San Diego; from there who knows.

The trip down from Statesboro to the KOA on Lake Oklawaha ( yeah, that’s a real name) would have been uneventful and quick but for two things.  The first was fun — we stopped in Claxton, Georgia to buy fruitcake.  One of the ways I bifurcate the world is between those who like fruitcake and those who would use it to build Trump’s infamous wall.  I am in the former camp — my grandmother made fruitcake that I always enjoyed ( except the one she saved after her house burned down — different story) and it has stuck.  What other baked dessert has so much fruit and so little sugar and flour ( ok the fruit has lots of sugars... ).  The factory there has been in the same family since 1949. We spoke to the granddaughter of the man who bought the plant in 49 and focused production on fruitcake only — in season they make 10000lbs a day.  Don’t worry — I haven’t bought any of you fruitcake as a gift. Claxton is a lovely little town in the middle of nice farm land alternating between cotton fields, sorghum, and pecan orchards.

We moved south down 301 at a good pace after the stop.  The farms gradually gave way to stands of Yellow Pine and the traffic increasingly consisted of log trucks — it was almost like being at home, with Palm trees in the mix as well.  The sandy soils changed to wetlands and the solitude of the Okeefenokee swamp.  In the ditches we saw two dead black bears — haven’t seen a live one yet. What is it with large roadkill mouldering on the side of the road in the U.S.A.  In Canada dead deer and bears disappear from the roadside before the corpse is cold either the driver takes them, the first cop on scene, the town or my son Alex scavenges them.

The swamp ends and  traffic picks up as soon as you cross the St. Mary’s river into Florida and so does the development. Even though we skirted well to the west of Jacksonville traffic increased and slowed us down for a while but we stayed on 301 almost to Ocala where Google Maps had us skirt slowly east and into the National Forest. This is where the second delay of the day happened and an important learning experience.  We followed google through several turns that made us feel we were running in a circle.  We passed the road to Fort McCoy — our destination was the Fort McCoy/ Lake Oklawaha KOA which Lorraine couldn’t find on our large map... As we moved further east and south on highway 40 we both became suspicious and Lorraine was still working with the map when Google told me to turn left off the highway... onto a sandy single lane forest road.  I made the turn — when you’re turning a trailer commitment is complete — and stopped.  “Phone the resort,” I asked Lorraine.
“I can’t. We’ve got no service.” She replied, a little panicky.
A pickup truck pulled up behind us and a young man in a hard hat got out. I unrolled the window...
“You can’t go in there,” He said, rather flatly. “At least not pulling that. You’ll be in sand up to your axles.”
“I was afraid of that”, I asked “ do you know where the Oklawaha KOA is?” ( Try saying that 3 times quickly).
“Where?” He asked and my heart sunk.
Longer story short — he had no idea where we were going, neither did Google.  It would have placed the campsite in the middle of a pine and palmetto forest given to regular wild fires with no road access...  It was after 6 and so even if we had phone service we could not phone them.
So we turned around on the sandy forest road — with the trailer in tow —Then navigated to Fort McCoy and used other maps to find out that we were within a couple of miles but on the wrong side of the river. We turned the trailer again and finally found the place about 7:30...

I had no idea that Florida had places like this still — remote, heavy bush with little cottagey vacation shacks and homes — most flying Maga Flags or the Confederate Battle Flag...  I’m sure if the ATV traffic ever stopped you’d be able to hear banjo music.  This is the kind of campground I like.  At the camp, Roger, possessed of two teeth and a hippie haircut, told us to park wherever we like and check into the office in the morning.  This kind of thing happens in our experience with RV camps, never.  We found a nice spot below a couple of trees and setup.

The big challenge is that because we had been lost we had no food for dinner in the trailer... We had assumed, foolishly, that we could grocery shop after setting up.  Roger, looked at us like we were half-wits. “There ain’t no grocery stores for 30 miles. If you need it here you gotta bring it with ya.”
“What about the little store back up the road?” We countered in harmony.
“Oh, that’s closed but there is some groceries at the Marathon gas y’all passed back on 316...”.

So I ran back to the Gas Station and procured the best dinner one can at a gas station at 8:00 at night — canned Camp’s beans, Packaged Smoked Sausage, and Pillsbury freezer Biscuits with Pillsbury Chocolate chip cookies for dessert.  Now we were really camping!