Friday, 28 April 2023
We had to change campsites today (and I was still anxious about whether I even had a site for tonight), so I decided to go to the campground's welcome center in hopes I could pick up an internet signal there.
It wasn't a very strong signal, but it was a signal. I used it to locate and get directions for various stops I wanted to make in Rome tomorrow: grocery store, laundromat, propane dealer, liquor store and post office.
I'd found on the campground's handouts that there was a trail that started and ended at the welcome center, and this trail wasn't very long and was ADA accessible, which sounded like just the ticket for Dext and me after all the steep hills we'd been climbing in our part of the campground. The trail was called Lakeside Trail, and it was a very pleasant walk.
I guess it was a campaign to promote children's literacy - but whatever prompted it, there were signs all along the trail that looked like they'd been taken straight out of a children's book. I've now learned that that's exactly what they were - the book is called Moth & Butterfly: Ta Da!, written by Dev Petty. It's a really good book (probably going to get banned somewhere for some weird reason) about the similarities and differences between the 2 types of insects and how a moth and a butterfly managed to retain a friendship throughout their respective metamorphoses. I eagerly looked forward to each page as we walked and sometimes forgot to look at the pretty lake and trees around us. (Dext was not similarly distracted.) I think kids who finished reading those pages could register somewhere for a free book. Nice idea.
The sun came out today, which gave me a much more optimistic view on things and made our walk actually possible.
We went back to the campground, where the guy who checked me in today was as nice as the woman yesterday was grumpy - what a relief. And nobody was occupying my site - my reservation was good - another relief. And the new campsite was relatively level and on fairly level ground (not down in a hole like yesterday's). And just altogether, things looked up today. Just as Scarlett promised.
After we checked in but before I went to our site, I parked at the building with the laundry and showers so I wouldn't have to haul all my clothes a quarter mile from my campsite. Everything was going well until it came to getting my clothes dry. The dryers were new and didn't work well at all, so instead of producing high heat, it felt more like low or no heat. It took me a LOT more time and money to get them dry. I should have waited for the laundromat tomorrow.
But even there I was lucky, though, because a nice young woman was doing lots of laundry and let me play through, so to speak. There were only 2 washers and she let me have one, and she's the one who told me what was going on with the dryers. She and her husband and young daughter are living full time in their 5th wheel in this state park, she said. They have both a landscaping business and an RV rental business locally (she said the sheets and towels she was washing were used for the rented RVs). She said they prefer living in the RV to living in a house. Interesting woman - I wished she had more time for me to talk to her.
Dext and I saw those 5 deer again this morning, and we saw a wild turkey on our last walk before bed at night.
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