A State at a Time: in Rocky Bayou

Tuesday, 6 March 2018

Rocky Bayou State Park, Niceville FL

Today is election day in Texas. Everybody vote, please!

I decided to stay here 3 nights – partly because I needed time to regroup and partly because they’re only charging $16 a night. Many volunteers here (from their accents I’m guessing many are from up north staying here for the winter and are getting rates in exchange for their work), and they’re all very helpful. And they have nice showers and 2 washers and dryers. Clean me and clean clothes. Yea!

I’ll leave tomorrow and head down Florida’s peninsula, on the way to Venice where Momma’s college roommate still lives.

Yesterday, besides the cleanliness routine, I reorganized the under-cabin storage area, which hadn’t been done since I got rid of so much storage/donation stuff when I was in Dallas. Today we have a 100% chance of rain predicted, so I’m going to try to do the same thing in-cabin. Currently, a whole seat is taken up by stuff in bags, most of which can go below, but I just need to sort it. By tonight, I hope to finally have created a space I and the critters can live in with relative comfort for a while. Sometime when the weather’s really bad and I don’t want to go out, I’m going to measure the actual floor space that’s left after putting dog beds and things on it.

I’m learning that if I act on my usual impatience, it’s almost always a disaster. I’m quickly learning that the only way to exist in this kind of environment is to take things step by step. Trying to do more than one thing at a time has usually been a mistake, that led to bigger mistakes. Who knew this trip would create such changes in my basic personality?

Everybody’s having trouble adjusting to the fact that we’re just not going home again. For instance, Dexter sometimes pees during the night. Inside. Fortunately, I guess, he’s doing it on the bottom stair by the door instead of in the middle of our almost nonexistent floor space.

On the couple of occasions when I’ve given in to Jasper’s pleas to not be caged up when I'm driving, he’s performed various bathroom functions on Gracie’s bed under the table. This last time, it was such a mess I had to take the bed apart and spray everything with some wonderful stuff that takes out pet smells (and costs a fortune), and then bag all the bed pieces up to contain the smells until I could get to a place like this park, where the sun’s been shining, to air out the bed’s foam insides, with washers to clean the outsides.

In that same washer, I cleaned my sheets which Roscoe had thrown up on, causing me to have to unmake my bed entirely, and then put it back together again after everything was clean. It’s a real project trying to make a bed that you can reach from only half of the bottom side.

Gracie so far seems to be the only untraumatized one, though I know she’d prefer her former life. Both the dogs clearly miss day care.

As you can see, bringing the critters has not been an unmitigated blessing, though I'm glad of their companionship.

I took both the dogs – separately, of course – along one of the nature/hiking trails they have here. They have little interpretive signs here and there along the trail. One sign they didn’t post was a warning about snakes and alligators, which made me relax about a possible danger. But on today’s early morning walk, I did see an alligator warning sign, and that made me really wonder why both dogs had been so extremely curious, ten minutes earlier, about what was in a culvert. And grateful I still have 2 whole dogs. Anyway, here are some photos I took on that walk.

Sand pines are native only to Florida and a tiny bit of Alabama. Their cones open up to release seeds only when there's fire. The increasing development in this area results in increasing aversion to fire, so the sand pines are in danger of extinction. In more ways than one, it's not nice to tamper with nature.