South Carolina - Day 15 - in Croft State Park

Croft State Park, Spartanburg

Thursday, 25 May 2023

I spent much of the day here unclogging the bathroom drain - as much as I could.  The real problem is in the s-bend or u-bend or whatever it's called, and I can't seem to get the connection unscrewed to empty it out.  But at least the flow is vastly improved so I don't feel like I totally wasted my time.

And I spent much of the rest of the day working on the latch on one of the kitchen drawers.  It broke a couple of months ago, and I had a replacement already but have been reluctant to take the time to fix it.  That particular latch has broken maybe 6 or 7 times since I've been on this trip, and it's the only one that has.  I'm just tired of fixing it.  Especially because the drawer is big and awkward and heavy, and I have to completely empty it out and turn it upside down and take off the handle just to fix the latch.  Major nuisance.  But today was the day and it got done - and the drawer got cleaned out, which made the effort seem more worthwhile.

To balance those time-consuming aggravations, I took Dext out on walks around the campground.  Our particular section is pretty small - only 25 campsites on a loop - though because of them being on a steep hill, Dext doesn't like it though I tell him the extra exercise is good for us.  But there's a 2nd section down the road a short way and once we walked down there.  It too has 25 sites on a steep hill, but it's also near a boat launch so there's some extra area for us to walk in.  And extra dogs for Dext to meet.  He's doing really well with the dog-meeting stuff, and I'm proud of him.

This campground includes horse stalls and a show ring and separate trails and other horse-y paraphernalia.  We were lucky in never seeing an actual horse, though we did see a couple of horse trailers.  Still, on this afternoon I took a chance and walked Dext down to the horse stalls.  It turned out to be a much longer walk than I'd expected and included several steep hills, so we got a good workout.  If there were any horses down there, we didn't see them.  And it made for a nice walk and something new for Dext to see and sniff.

I picked up a handout in the office labeled: "3Rs Explosives Safety Guide," saying this was the "Former Camp Croft."  Apparently this area was, among other uses, a firing range during WWII, and while they don't think we're likely to find munitions here after all these years, they do want people to be aware that they might still be around.  A little unsettling.

One of the campers here had something I've never seen before.  He had a hammock strung up and above it, attached to the hammock cords, was a mosquito net.  So that arrangement allowed the net to be suspended above the hammock and still draped over the hammock.  Seemed like a good solution for when, like now, you have pleasant weather but way too many bugs for sitting out much.

No internet connection - I barely had phone service - but we managed to get along very peacefully without the connectivity.  As a sample:

That's Bucky.  His eyes were closed and I thought he was asleep
until the moment I pushed the shutter on the camera.