South Carolina - Day 2 - in Anderson and the campground

Anderson/Lake Hartwell KOA, Anderson

Tuesday, 2 through Sunday, 7 May 2023

I'd originally reserved a space here for the first 5 days of May, but eventually I got comfortable enough to extend my stay until the 8th.  The first 2 nights were a little tough for 2 reasons: I had trouble getting level on the site, but especially we were almost directly under one of the 3 big area lights the campground has, making the RV's inside almost daylight-bright during the night.  I spent 2 nights mostly without sleep.  But the campground shuffled me around to a slightly better situation, making it more livable. 

During the week I stayed here, I took a trip up to Clemson, just because of Clemson University and the outstanding record of its football team.  (Okay, I know that's superficial, but it's something in South Carolina I've heard of.)  I'll put that trip in a separate post.

I completed and published 5 blog posts I'd drafted a week or so ago in the word processing program, then wrote and published 7 more.  It was a lot of work but they dated back to early April and I was glad to get caught up as far as April 24th.

One day I drove into Anderson for groceries and to find a park to give Dexter someplace new to walk.  Google insisted the only way for me to get to the park was to plow through the trees, instead of recognizing the entrance drive that led to a playground and parking area.  Google can be truly bizarre at times.

The park, called Equinox Park for some reason I couldn't figure out, is apparently a work in progress.  There isn't much there right now, besides trees and lots of grass.  They have a sort of baseball diamond and some basketball hoops set up in the parking area; they have some playground equipment and a war memorial.  I found a local newspaper article from a few years ago that said the town had gotten some money to help redevelop this very old park and make it ADA compliant, and apparently that's coming along gradually.  Here's the war memorial.

A memorial to Vietnam veterans.
I was interested to see that the dates are shown as "1957 -   "
and names are still being added (below).

During this week in the campground, I also set up an appointment for the cats at a vet (claw-clipping), paid bills, checked the weather forecasts for the next few days, checked my email, made reservations at another campground - just generally enjoyed having an internet connection again.

The best feature of this campground from my point of view is a walking trail they've set up in the surrounding woods.  

This trail winds around much more than this photo shows, and it involves some significant hills that this photo only hints at.  Dext and I get a decent workout when we walk it, which we did 4 or 5 times during our stay.  It takes us a half hour to walk the whole trail.  And we found some hidden treasures.

Do you see the turtles hiding under the bushes?  We didn't, right away at least.  It was on our second walk that I first saw that first turtle, though Dext missed it.  He saw it the next time, though, and it took a while before he was convinced it wasn't a real turtle.  It was that third walk when Dext pointed out the 2nd turtle to me, which we'd both missed up until then.  I only ever saw those 2 and couldn't help wondering if there were another we just hadn't found.

I also saw what I took to be Pegasus tracks on the trail.  They looked like horses' hooves, but there were only 4 of them.  So of course I assumed they showed Pegasus had touched down, then taken off again.

A couple told me they'd seen a Scarlet Tanager when they'd walked along the trail, but they not only had their dogs with them, they also didn't have binoculars or camera.  When we saw them, they'd ditched the dogs and were setting back off on the trail fully equipped.

I never saw anything interesting like that - mostly just sparrows, maybe some mockingbirds and jays, lots of squirrels.  Oddly, I never saw a rabbit or a deer here, though it seemed good country for both of them.

I talked once with some guys who looked 30-ish - I'd seen them leave with their boat very early each morning, so I asked them about it.  They said there was a 3-day military bass fishing tournament in Lake Hartwell - and I later noticed that several of the campsites had military-looking guys staying there.  Apparently they all had fun, though one guy said his team came in "not last."

One day the frig shut itself off again for no reason that I could see.  Luckily it was during the day, so I heard a warning beep that the gas was shut off.  Actually, there was plenty of gas and no reason at all for it to shut off, but I temporarily switched to electricity until the frig's temp went up because the electricity isn't reliable in that thing, and I switched it back to gas.

One night Dext set off the carbon monoxide detector twice, and each time I had to wake up, get up, shove his bottom over, and find the reset button to shut off the beeping, then go back to bed and try to go back to sleep.

And I've got more kitten photos:

Jimmy on the left, Bucky on the right

I took this photo to show their usual water bowl habits.  Bucky always drinks from the opposite side of the bowl from where he's sitting.  It has nothing to do with debris in the water or anything rational like that.  This is just what he does - drape himself over the entire bowl.  So when Jimmy also wants some water, he wedges his head into whatever space he can wrest from Bucky, as you see above.  This is absolutely common.  Of course, Lily and Dexter just wait their turns - and I keep an eye on the kittens because Bucky will stay draped over the bowl (asserting possession) long after he's through drinking, keeping the others away.

Below, I think I uploaded a video of Jimmy giving Bucky a vigorous bath, followed by a somewhat blurred still photo that I took immediately after I stopped the video, showing Bucky being tired of the mauling.