Heading South

     It seems like it’s been a long winter. We got back from our New England trip on November 13, and we weren’t able to get away again until March 11. We usually leave for Florida in mid-February, but doctor’s and dentist’s appointments, both in Virginia and Florida, pushed the date back too far for our taste. A March snowstorm looked like it would push things back even further, but things cleared off in time for us to leave as planned.

     The purpose of the trip was to visit Jean’s family in Florida, and also to look around at a possible place to move. Jean’s farm is up for sale, and we will be relocating. To date, we are thinking of either southeastern Virginia or Florida, so this was a preliminary scouting trip as well as running away from winter.

     We began by heading east instead of south. After a few hours, we arrived at the Watermen’s Museum in Yorktown. Besides being members, we are friends with the staff there and they let us park at the museum for free (complete with electricity). Our plan was to spend a couple of days visiting friends in Williamsburg and Mathews and looking around at Mathews and Deltaville. Our friends at the Museum convinced us to stay another night because there was going to be a folk-jam at the Museum. There was and it was rollicking good fun.

     Over two days we reconnected with some friends and got a sense of the situation on the Middle Peninsula of Virginia (mostly rural, lots of boating). We came away impressed with the possibilities.

There was one problem we had the night before we left. As we were settling down for the night, we smelled smoke. After looking all around, Jean noticed that the microwave was full of smoke. Opening it (carefully) we found a burning pot holder (we use the microwave mainly for storage). It appeared that in resetting the clock with insufficient light we had accidently turned it on. The burning pot holder got stamped out in the parking lot and the rest of the contents spent the night on the side of an outside sink. Lesson: always have good light when you set the microwave.

     But now it was time to move on. The plan was to follow Route 17 all the way to Florida, then de-winterize the rig and follow the coast to Palm City. Just as we were about to head out, the Yorktown bridge opened to let a Landing Dock Ship out that had been loading at the Naval Weapons Station.

      With that bit of excitement, we plunged south through the madness of Hampton Roads. We are basically not in tourist mode, just making time to the main destination of Florida. But we were not so much in a hurry that were willing to take the interstate. We avoid interstates as much as possible.

     Route 17 runs for a while alongside the Great Dismal Swamp Canal. This marks the east side of the Great Dismal Swamp, or what remains of it. It is thought that it was originally over a million acres in size, but some draining and much logging has reduced it considerably. Today it is a protected area of about 125,000 acres. We stopped at a car-and-boat rest area alongside the canal. (The canal is a part of the Intracoastal Waterway.)

     We were able to take a boardwalk through the swamp itself. From the road it looks like much of the tangled forest you can see all up and down the coast. But when you get into it, it is definitely a swamp. We didn’t spot any wildlife, but we did hear frogs at one spot.

     As we headed on south, we could watch Spring unrolling. In Virginia and North Carolina, we saw lots of daffodils. When we got into South Carolina we began seeing redbuds and wisteria blooming. Moving into Georgia we were wowed by huge banks of azaleas. Just before the South Carolina line, we detoured out to a beach. The first beach of the trip. Jean was ecstatic. It was cool, but not cold enough to keep the beach-goers away. We feel like we are getting somewhere.

     A portion of Route 17 in Georgia is the Sweetgrass Basket Makers Highway. African Americans living in the Mount Pleasant area have set up booths and sell sweetgrass baskets there for years. The craft goes all the way back to their African ancestors. There weren’t too many booths open at this time of year, but we stopped at one and Jean bought a small basket.

 

     As mentioned, we were just passing through and not stopping for areas of interest, but driving through rural Georgia, we spotted something we couldn’t resist.

We had to turn around and go look. This is next to a very large church, which is of no interest, of course.

     Route 17 just skims the edge of Savannah — the industrial edge at that. We were through very quickly. This area is low country Georgia. We passed by an old rice plantation that we had toured on a previous trip. We made it into Florida by 4:15 and stopped at the Welcome Center for new maps (we go through them pretty fast). We looked for an old campground that we had stayed at before, but it seemed to be lost to new development. We managed to score a site at a nearby campground, and had time to de-winterize (summerize?) the rig before dark. We are now at our destination and ready to explore. We are not due to visit Jean’s family for two weeks, so we are fancy-free. (We do have a problem with the ceiling vent we need to deal with, there’s always something.) For the next couple of weeks, it’s check out Florida. Can’t wait to get started.