Monday, 8 May through Sunday, 14 May 2023
This is a very nice campground, owned and operated by a couple maybe 10 years younger than me. I complemented the woman on the beautiful flower beds, and she told me when they bought the campground 3 years ago it was a mess. I guess the previous owners had let the place get a little run down. She said the owner of a local plant store had been a lifeline for her, that she would often send the woman photos of a plant she'd found in one of the beds and ask if it was a keeper or a potential problem. She said she and her husband were originally from Ohio where the soil was beautiful and dark and great for plants, and this clay soil here stumped her. She said she'd learned to dig a hole 2' wide for each plant, because of needing that much room to work mulch into the clay so the plants could thrive. And so forth. Nice folks.
They've scattered gnomes of all sizes and shapes all over the campground, and when you register you get a list that you can fill out by going on a sort of scavenger hunt, finding the different types. I never bothered to try, but I saw several families and couples out on the quest. A nice idea.
This weekend was their 3rd annual anniversary celebration - the anniversary of their reopening the campground. They opened the swimming pool for the first time this year, offered lots of games and competitions and food - just generally a celebration. Another nice idea. I would have thought early May was a tad early for a swimming pool, but we had pretty warm weather all week with temps in the mid- to upper 80s every day and rarely below 60° at night. We did have some rain and thunder now and then, but it never amounted to much.
This campground has a surprisingly large and varied stock of DVDs on offer in the laundry room. I asked at the desk if they were for rent or trade, and she said I could take what I wanted and bring it back or not as I chose. I've seen plenty of book exchanges, but never one for DVDs. I've been watching my own for a really long time now, so I borrowed a batch of them.
The first I watched was Skyfall, a James Bond/Daniel Craig movie that I'd heard about and wanted to see. And my opinion is that it was an incredible waste of talent - Judy Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Javier Bardem, and Daniel Craig of course. All wonderful actors and this movie was almost entirely special effects. Why even bother to have the actors if you're not going to use them.
Next I watched Finding Nemo, which I'd seen several years ago but not since. I thought that movie was as wonderful as Skyfall was a waste of time. I really wanted to keep it but decided to put it back so families who came to the campground would have a chance to see it too.
And I watched Up In the Air, one of those that George Clooney has done that proves he's got a lot more going for him than good looks. I found his character really tragic, in the sense that King Lear was a tragic character - they bring it on themselves, but that doesn't stop it from being a sad situation. This film stayed stuck in my mind for days.
One day here was really strange. At 1:50 AM, the smell of poop was strong enough to wake me up. At first I thought it was because Dext ate something wrong, but couldn't find anything on the floor. And my next thought was that Lily was in the box, but she wasn't. Which narrowed it down to the kittens, who started mewing - and that was it. They'd not only managed to spread it around their crate, but it smeared through the mesh onto the towel that I always wrap around the mesh top and sides to discourage them from trying to claw out. I'd just washed that towel the day before, but now I knew the mess was too much to try to hand-wash it out. It took a half hour to clean all that up, and the crate was still not clean enough to put the kittens back in, so I let them stay out.
They lived up to my worst expectations and refused to let me go back to sleep, and I finally gave up at 3:15. I'd put the mess into a trash bag and stuck it out the door earlier, so on Dext's and my first walk I dropped it in the dumpster. Then I did a load of laundry before 6:00 AM, followed by trying to clean the cats' crate, leaving it on the picnic table to air out all day long.
I spent some time trying to make reservations for later this month and called a place called Driftwood RV, but the only number online was for a campground of the same name in Fulton, TX. I called it anyway, just in case, but the guy confirmed he was indeed in Texas. I was about to hang up and he said, "Can I tell you something for 1 minute?" I thought, uh-oh, but said yes, and he launched into a nonstop monologue along the lines of "Jesus died for our sins." I don't know how long he would have gone on but I gave him about 30 seconds - it really was nonstop - and finally interrupted him with "Thank you" and hung up. He was so forceful about it.
When Dext and I were walking in the campground, we met a guy with a Trump '24 bumper sticker on his vehicle, wearing a t-shirt that said, "When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty." Ideas like that are making me nervous these days, after the ghastly events of January 6th 2 years ago. I was curious and looked that saying up and found that many people attribute it to Thomas Jefferson. But the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which maintains Monticello, says they've searched his writings and have found no evidence he ever said that. The fact check site I saw said the expression became popular in Australia some time back. So there you go.
That same day I made a list of the things I specifically didn't want to leave South Carolina without seeing, grouped them geographically, found state parks in those vicinities, and started trying to piece together reservations. That was harder than you might think because most South Carolina state parks require 2-night stays on the weekends, and those were usually places where I didn't want to stay 2 nights.
Then I suddenly realized I hadn't made a reservation for when I move to North Carolina, and I've learned to plan ahead on that sort of thing, so I got that done.
For the second day I had nachos for lunch and a salad for supper and today I decided to have a beer with the nachos. Because of the kittens I knocked the beer off the counter and the lid stayed on but half the bottle spilled out onto the floor and ran under Dext's bed, because this site isn't really level. Yet another mess to clean up. So between the beer and the kittens and the weird parks encounters, it was a strange sort of day.
A few days later one of the kittens again pooped in the crate, but that time it hadn't made nearly as much of a mess and was much easier to clean up.
That same day the two of them were racing around the various levels of the RV, bouncing off the walls (literally), and they actually managed to knock the clock off the wall and over the back of the driver's seat. Anna fixed a hook for that clock that works so well even the serious bumps the RV's gone over haven't knocked it off - but the kittens managed it.
Given their somewhat whacko behavior, I'd've thought we were having a full moon, but I could see for myself in the mornings that it was only a half moon and it was waning, so that couldn't have been it.
The birds - especially the Robins - start singing like crazy about 4:30, which is a good 2 hours before sunrise. They get downright raucous after they get warmed up. It's really nice to hear them.
The campground had given me a site not far from the laundry and showers, as I'd asked, but when I checked in they warned me that I'd need to move to a different site for the last 2 nights because of a previous reservation. Then it turned out they couldn't put me in the site I'd requested as my second site because the person who'd been staying there had decided to extend her stay, which meant I'd have to choose among 5 other sites, none of which was especially level. I finally settled on the least sloped one, but it was still more than I was comfortable with. But that was a Saturday so the campground was pretty full and they couldn't move me anywhere else. Instead, a couple of the employees came over with wood blocks to put under my front wheels to level us. The 3rd block up made it work fine, but after they'd gone I realized that put us so high in the air that Dexter had trouble getting in and out. At 8 years old, he's getting on in age and just can't jump like he used to be able to. And I couldn't put out the stool Anna gave me because I need it to get onto my much-taller-than-the-original mattress. I was almost ready to try to take out one of the levels of blocks, but I wasn't sure I'd be able to get us back up onto the 2 layers and figured I'd just help Dext up if he needed it.
One day here we drove into Columbia, to see what the capital city had to offer, and I'll write about that in a separate post.
Another day we drove into Clinton to do errands and take a look around town. We passed something called Palmetto Equestrian Therapeutic Riding, so I was curious and looked it up. They say they take people from age 3 to adults who suffer from a wide variety of disabilities. The list on their website includes but is by no means limited to: dementia, autism, cerebral palsy, scoliosis, stroke, Down's syndrome. I don't know how much they charge, but I've heard equine therapy can be very helpful to people.
We went to the grocery store, but I couldn't find a park where we could stop for lunch and a walk, so I thought I'd take Dext over to the Presbyterian College. Oops - today was apparently graduation day and streets were blocked off and parking lots were full. I finally found a back route to an open area that wasn't being used, and we managed to park under a shade tree. But we got our walk and our lunch.
I stopped to get gasoline - $3.09 at an extremely slow pump - and I unexpectedly had a really hard time getting to the pump. I thought I could make a turn into an open slot, but it was tighter than I'd realized and I sort of got wedged and couldn't maneuver. There was a car parked behind me (and I'm not so great with backing up anyway) and a car at the pump on the right, and the pump I was trying to get to on my left, and I just had to back-and-forth a bunch of times while everybody watched (and nobody offered to help). It was after all that effort that I found the pump went so slowly you'd think it was January.
I passed a billboard that showed a woman and small child and said, "Work doesn't work without affordable child care." I didn't see who paid for it.
A couple of factoids I ran across about South Carolina: SC didn't ratify the 19th amendment (women get to vote) until 1969, almost 50 years after it was adopted. And in SC, women weren't allowed to serve on juries until 1967, with only Mississippi waiting longer to decide that women really might be able to determine truth from falsehood. (Though it's women who usually do the child rearing and develop ESP on recognizing the signs of lying.) Anyway. These seem like signals that this state may not be the most enlightened place for a woman to live.
The last night I was here, I woke up at 11:45 PM and never managed to get back to sleep. Not really something you'd want to do before hitting the road.
And one more kitty photo.
.JPG) |
| Like I said, they both like to lie on these cushions to see outside. That's Bucky on the left, Jimmy on the right. |
No comments:
Post a Comment