Georgia - Day 22 - to Augusta and Mistletoe

Mistletoe State Park, Appling

Friday, 14 April 2023

today's route

The rain finally stopped this morning and the sun started breaking through, which was a refreshing change.

One of the goals for today's travel was to see Augusta, so that's the way we headed.

After passing the turn for the Bellevue Plantation, I somehow got mixed up on highways and directions.  Google is turning out to be not very reliable in Georgia's towns and roadways.  It's not like I was traveling on obscure backroads either - today's route to Augusta should have been a straight shot on US-25.

Anyway, I ended up driving through Waynesboro where I got behind a vehicle with a sticker that said "Don't Feed the Bears - That's Our Job."  And it had a label for Burke County School Nutrition.  I'm guessing the local mascot is the Bears.

Waynesboro claims the title of "The Bird Dog Capitol of the World."  Since 1901, they've hosted the annual Georgia Field Trials for bird dogs, which I suppose is a pretty good basis for their claim.  

Somehow there was more highway mixup in Historic Waynesboro.  Georgia just doesn't label its roads very well, and Google doesn't give accurate directions - it says roads are named one thing when the signs (if Georgia's provided them) say something different.  Very frustrating.

I stopped for gas at $3.37/gallon - the cheapest I could find.

I passed through a town named Hephzibah.  I knew this name was from the Bible but didn't know anything else, so I looked it up.  In the Books of Kings, Hephzibah is married to Hezekiah, king of Judah, and she's the mother of the next king, Manasseh, and she's apparently the daughter of the prophet Isaiah.  That's all they say about her.

The Georgia town of Hephzibah was originally named Brothersville, for 3 brothers who all settled in the area.  But then a Baptist seminary was established here, and they started the Hephzibah Baptist Church, and somehow this convinced the legislature to change the town's name to Hephzibah.  Brothersville is easier to spell.

The blue line shows our travel through town.

In Augusta (I had to guess that's where I was because there wasn't a highway sign), I was heading for a dog park I'd found online.  I was pleased that the directions seemed to be working okay - until I came to a warning sign: "Low Bridge - 10'5" Clearance."  Well, I sure wasn't taking a chance on that and had to find a way around it while not getting too lost in trying to find the park.  After I drove around a bit, I finally stopped and pulled out my hotspot and computer and figured out where I was and how to get to the park, and we set back off again.  And found the park!

It was hilly but big and heavily treed, giving Dext room to check out lots of smells.  While we were there, another woman and her dog joined us.

She said she was from Utah, but they'd moved here because her husband was originally from South Carolina and there was family around.  She said she missed the fresh clear air of Utah and found the air here very heavy and not refreshing.  But she said she'd been enjoying the diversity here, because she'd been raised almost entirely among white people and she very much liked the change.  I wished I could have talked with her longer, but Dext was sitting at the gate, obviously waiting for me to take him back home for lunch.

After that, we ran some errands - Target, PetsMart, Staples to copy my income tax return, a post office to mail it.  Not a one of those places was easy to find and I kept having to stop and pull out my hotspot and laptop to get us found again.  Between Google and Georgia, I'm just having a hard time navigating this month.

Back on the road, we managed to make it to the campground without further problems - until it came to getting into our assigned campsite.  When I'd registered, the ranger had pointed out my campsite on the map, designated by a half-circle.  In all previous campgrounds, those half-circles indicated a pull-through campsite, and the ranger said I'd pull into the first driveway entrance.

Imagine my confusion when, driving through the campground, I came to the campsite numbered before mine, and then saw a driveway that wasn't labeled but, farther in, had a sign for the campsite after mine.  Trustingly, I pulled in hoping for my site - and I found it.  But it was not pull-through.  That one driveway was access for my site, which actually turned out to be a back-in site, as well as my next neighbor's site, and also for the site that technically fronted on the opposite side of the hill we were perched on.

And that was another thing.  The campground was incredibly hilly, and we were again at the top of a hill so the driveway was also very steep.  I don't know what the designers of the campground intended I do, but all I could figure was to back-and-forth over and over until I'd gotten turned sideways to the way I'd been told to enter so I could back into the one space remaining there that had an unused picnic table and power box.  Once I'd finally gotten us parked in a semi-level area and I got out to plug the RV in, I found the sign with our campsite number on it - it was just stuck in the middle of the site, facing the road but hidden by bushes and totally useless as an identifier.

And besides all that, it had obviously been raining here too and the ground was very muddy and sloggy - even getting out of the RV required my rubber boots.  Dext was not happy about it.  What a mess.  I so wished we could have stayed back at Magnolia Springs, despite its steep hills, but we were here for 2 days.