Trip Report 48 - Atlanta to Florida
January 7, 2000
12/19/99 After a pleasant 18-day stay in Atlanta, we finally got underway, deciding at the last minute to go only the 82 miles to Athens, home of the University of Georgia. Sunday morning proved a good time to tow the trailer out of Atlanta, since the traffic on the expressways was somewhat less frenetic than usual. Once we were out of the Atlanta metro area the drive was on 4-lane state highways (mostly not limited access), through pleasantly rolling forest.
On Sunday, with the University in Christmas recess, we had no trouble parking our 55' rig in downtown Athens, on the edge of campus and two blocks from the "Founders Garden", three pleasantly landscaped acres surrounding a house which was the original home of the first garden club in America. We walked through the garden, enjoying the overall design, then walked through a bit of the town and campus, hoping to see the Georgia Art Museum, then telephoned the museum, to find it is on the opposite side of campus, a couple of miles away. A short drive brought us to a large, nearly empty, parking lot, where we again had no trouble parking the truck and trailer, practically in front of the museum entrance.
The museum collection is housed in an attractive modern building. The portion of the collection which interested us was from the West Foundation Collection - American neo-classical sculpture and Hudson River School paintings. These were wonderful, and included some artists of whom we had previously not been aware. We left the museum about 4:30 p.m., and drove 12 miles south to Pine Lake Campground - a large pleasant campground with fairly large campsites set in a mature forest.
12/20 Today, we moved on to Clemson, South Carolina, to see the South Carolina Botanical Garden, on the edge of the Clemson University campus. We spent a pleasant 90 minutes wandering through the gardens. This time of year, the only flowers were a few early camellias, but we enjoyed the paths through mature forest, along little streams, past whimsical sculptures made from branches and other local materials. Parking with the trailer was no problem - we had a large parking lot almost entirely to ourselves.
After Clemson, we drove another three hours to Columbia, South Carolina, the state capitol. We chose Barnyard RV Park in spite of the name, since it is close to town and has fairly large full-hookup sites. It's in Lexington, a suburb southwest of Columbia. The RV Park is nice, but it is in the low-rent district - a scruffy collection of pawn shops, used car lots, faith healers, flea markets, etc. The white-haired grandmotherly lady running the campground office was interesting to talk to. She and her husband owned the farm on which the RV-Park and a huge flea market are built. Many years ago, they retired, sold the farm to a developer, talked the developer into building the RV Park on the rear portion, then got themselves hired as managers of the park.
12/23 The weather has turned miserable - rainy and 40's, so we got lazy. Other than a little shopping, the only significant activity was a visit to the Columbia Museum of Art. It's an attractive new building, but Mr. Kress, who built the original collection, obviously had quite different art tastes than ours. Columbia as a whole feels somewhat depressed and run-down, in spite of being the state capital and the home of the University of South Carolina. On another day, Helen went off on her own to tour some mansions - all of which turned out to be closed (contrary to their published schedules). The university campus was attractive with many interesting old buildings. One theatre was a classic temple.
12/24 Traveling on Christmas Eve, we drove two hours down Interstate 26 to Charleston, pulling into The Campground at James Island County Park in early afternoon. This may be the nicest county-operated RV Park we've seen - large sites, pleasant surrounding, full hookups, a desk with a phone plug for computer users in an activity center that is always open, and a substantial effort to establish naturalistic plantings of interesting trees and shrubs. Miles of paved walking/biking paths wander through the large park.
The park roads are decorated for Christmas - with a large number of complex colored light displays along the road and thousands of additional lights strung randomly through the trees. We particularly enjoyed a dolphin, on the other side of a pond, jumping through a huge arc and landing in the pond with a big splash of white lights. The reflections of the lights in the pond, viewed through a fringe of trees, added to the overall effect.
At one point, a snowball fight is going on, back and forth across the road. Two children, bundled up in winter clothes, one on each side of the road, are throwing snowballs at each other. There are even white snowballs, flying back and forth across the road above the cars. The artistry is amazing. This is done with nothing but arrangements of colored lights and electronic switches which cycle groups of lights on and off at precise times.
Four large Christmas trees are set up with switches for children to flip, changing their lights from all red to all green, to blue, to arbitrary combinations of those colors. We flipped a few too, because we liked the all blue and most kids liked the all red.
A couple of the walking trails are also elaborately decorated, with animated rabbits, butterflies, reindeer, elves, etc, all constructed from thousands of little colored lights and scattered picturesquely through the woods. Bing Crosby crooning White Christmas from somewhere deep in the woods competed with the noise of enthusiastic children frolicking on the trails.
Beginning at dusk, a bumper-to-bumper stream of cars drove through the three miles of these light displays, paying $10/car at the entrance. In the middle of the park, a carousel, snack bar, a marshmallow roast, and other children's attractions are set up. We get the whole show for free since we're already in the park, and can drive the road or simply walk the few hundred yards from the RV Park area to the decorated trails. A few of the light displays are visible through the trees from our campsite, and a few of the campground residents have strung lights around their RVs, giving the campground a festive atmosphere.
An earlier foray out to get the feel of the land took us to Folly Island and the beach. The whole area is low country with boardwalks over standing water in the campground and vast marshlands inland from the barrier islands. We looked for signs of damage from flooding from Hurricane Floyd this fall, but weren't able to identify any. About half the dwellings (the newer ones) on Folly Island are built high on stilts. We saw fancy modern high rise buildings adjacent to old dilapidated cottages. Browsing through the real estate ads in the local paper showed that a small building lot with a view can cost $100,000 - so we suspect those rundown cottages won't be around much longer. A walk on the beach in the sunshine and cool wind, a pocketful of pretty seashell fragments, and we were ready to head back to our cosy trailer.
If you stay at James Island, plan a half-hour stop at the Jim Booth Art Gallery on Maybank Highway on the way into Charleston. His artwork is realistic but every bit as romantic as that Thomas Kincaid. Lighthouses, raging Atlantic storms, clipper ships, ancient moss draped oaks, sunsets and sunrises - they are all here and are well displayed in this spacious gallery- with everything for sale.
12/26 The Gibbes Museum of Art is in an interesting old building, close to the historic district. The collection primarily features local artists, giving an interesting view of southern life during the past two centuries. A large modern addition at the back of the building was closed for installation of a new exhibit, so our visit didn't take long.
Later, we walked through the historic district and around the waterfront. There are hundreds of buildings dating from the 1700's and early 1800's. Charleston enacted strong preservation laws a long time ago, so most of the early buildings have been carefully restored.
12/27 Magnolia Plantation is interesting in that it has been owned by the same family since its original settlement in the late 1600's. Eleven generations of Draytons have lived here. The extensive gardens were first opened to the public in 1870, making it one of America's first tourist attractions of this type. The house is modest compared to others we've seen, but is made interesting by a feeling of authenticity, having have been lived in continuously by descendents of the original builder until it became a museum in 1975. Some of the furnishings have been in the family since the early 1800's. The history of the house is fascinating, but too long and complex to relate here.
The plantation is on very low ground along the Ashley River, and the main crop was always rice, grown in flooded fields in the traditional manner. Most of these extensive rice fields have now been allowed to revert back to nature, becoming cypress swamps or open grassy marshlands, all maintained as a private wildlife preserve. Some of the flooded areas near the house have become decorative pools, integrated into the gardens.
12/28 to 12/30 Although the gardens at Magnolia Plantation were disappointing - mostly narrow, somewhat overgrown paths with no broad vistas, the trip to Middleton Place, was a delight. The grounds, laid out in 1741 and claiming to be America's oldest landscaped gardens, were large and expansive Massive live oaks lined the earthworks between the flooded rice fields, and the Ashley river was visible from many viewpoints. The relatively modest 1755 house was packed with family portraits by West and Scully and the furniture was all authentic antiques. And the tour guides knew their stuff. The working-plantation portions - smithy, weaving shed, etc., were open and inviting, in use by active artisans. The Venison Stew with corn bread, the Panned Quail with ham and white grapes and the Shrimp and grits with southern sauce all sounded worth a trip to the restaurant but we were too tired to make the 1/2 hour drive back out to it at dinnertime.
The earliest mansions in Charleston were built with money from the shipping of North American natural resources to Europe. Later fortunes came from rice growing. The opening of the West after the Civil War (or should I say The War Between the States, now that I'm in the South) doomed the rice plantations here as heavy equipment couldn’t be used in the swampland. So the economy declined and the mansions moldered for years, spared from modern progress. More recently, the city realized there was tourist money to be had and the restorations are full apace. The Visitors Center, tour companies, and public transit systems are well organized for easy getting around and the size and integrity of the historic district is impressive.
12/30 Helen drove into Charleston, parked at the visitor's center and took the transit system thru the historic parts of the town, stopping several times to tour houses. Almost all of the old houses and many of the newer ones have well developed gardens in narrow side yards.
The Calhoun Mansion tour, $16 no credit cards, was a departure from the old historic, as it dates only to 1876 and is basically an Italianate style house with a heavily ornamented interior -- Every surface was patterned, some real, many faux. The house is still lived in but usually open for tours. The furniture was an eclectic collection of what the wealthy owner could find that might fit in. Really interesting. The garden, with many fountains and statues, was a pleasant place to sit before the tour began.
The 1825/1837 Edmund-Alston House and the 1808 Nathaniel Russell House were good tours. Both houses displayed well restored ornate first floors and rather plain upper level rooms.
I would have liked to see Drayton Hall and Boone Plantation, but we were ready to move on.
12/31 Moving day - but only a couple of hours, to Savannah Georgia. We were a little nervous about traveling on New Year's Eve, but at mid-day, traffic was light. We stopped at a large grocery store on the way to the campground, with trailer. Even the grocery store was not particularly crowded. Any Y2K hoarding had apparently happened earlier. We chose River's End Campground and RV Park, largely because of its interesting location in a residential community on Tybee Island, a couple of blocks from the beach and the Tybee Lighthouse. It's also one of the closest campgrounds to the Savannah historic district (although still 16 miles away).
The scenery along the drive was interesting - alternating between oak and pine forests and tidal marsh. Much of the Southeast was under the ocean during the Pleistocene era (ending about half a million years ago). Much of it will be under water again if the current warming trend continues and the ocean rises another few feet.
The campground finally feels like the deep South - perhaps because there are tendrils of spanish moss hanging down in front of my window from the live oak above our trailer. When all else is quiet, we can hear the gentle sounds of ocean surf, just a few blocks away in three directions (we're on a point, extending into the ocean at the mouth of the Savannah River.)
1/1/2000 That date looks like a mistake - it will take a long time to get used to "00". On the other hand, it was comforting to wake up and find that the laptops said "2000" and not "1900". I "knew" they would, of course, since I had tested all our programs for Y2K compatibility months ago. Nevertheless, there remained the nagging little doubt that perhaps I had forgotten something. Anyway, the world survived far better than even the optimists had expected.
The newspapers, by hunting all over the world, managed to find a handful of amusing little Y2K incidents. We heard directly of only one: A friend spent a long and frustrating time on January 1st checking in to a very large and sophisticated RV Park whose reservations and accounting computers failed, apparently due to a Y2K bug. End of the Y2K story! (But not quite the end: the leap year bug remains, but it's hard to imagine it causing really major problems). Now if only we could mobilize as effectively to fix the assorted impending global disasters which don't have quite so definite a deadline.
Savannah is an attractive old city. The historic area is laid out on a square grid with small parks interrupting the streets every few blocks - originally 22 such parks, although a few have vanished. It's a very pleasant place to simply walk around, enjoying the ambience. The old brick warehouses on the bluff overlooking the river are being restored - the lower levels as boutiques and restaurants, and the upper levels as offices, hotels, and apartments. Strict zoning apparently has been in place for many years. The only high-rise building is a hotel across the river, well away from the historic center of town and easily accessible only by water taxi.
We spent a fairly lazy four days here. We wandered around the waterfront and some of the historic district on foot. We visited the art museum (interesting building, but not much of an art collection). We tried to visit some of the architecturally interesting old church buildings, but they all seemed to be locked up tight. Helen toured two antebellum mansions, and Dave took a couple of long walks through the Tybee Island neighborhoods and along the beaches.
The Owens-Thomas House is the tour to take in Savannah. The house has several unusual architectural elements. For example, The front hall/stairway is spanned by an arched bridge on the second floor; One of the rooms is a squished-D shape; A square room looks elliptical; The first freshwater and sewer system in Savannah; A first rate ventilation system.
Several of the historic places are trying hard to recapture some of the slave lifestyles, but it is difficult, since the history is sketchy and the dwellings and artifacts are mostly destroyed, especially in the cities. Even so, Middleton Place near Charleston and the Owens-Thomas house in Savannah have informative displays and ongoing research projects.
Many of the houses open for tour were shabby and still being restored. A return here in 10 years looks promising.
During the past week, Dave spent quite a bit of time with the laptop hooked up to various campground telephones, downloading data from our various brokerage and mutual fund companies. The great majority of our income comes as year-end distributions from mutual funds, so the 4th-quarter estimated tax payment, due January 15, is the big one. It's always a scramble to get data together in time to make this payment, and we can't depend on paper year-end statements being sent out in time, much less catching up to us before the deadline via our mail forwarding service. The Internet has been a huge benefit.
1/4 Last night, it began to feel like time to move on, so we fired up the mapping software and started looking for the next interesting place to the south. The Okefenokee Swamp jumped up and waved its hand. The drive was 4 1/2 hours, down I-95 through the coastal pine plantations and tidal marshes all the way to Florida, then west. The state line is remarkably convoluted here. As we drove fairly straight west across the south edge of the swamp, we crossed back into Georgia, then into Florida again, and finally back into Georgia as we turned north up the west side of the swamp.
We weren't as careful as we should have been in interpreting the map. These roads were all solid red lines on the map, typical of minor state highways. We didn't notice that one 7-mile stretch was a slightly narrower red line. It started out OK, but quickly disintegrated, going from broken blacktop to gravel and then to rutted sand. To make things even more interesting, we met two loaded logging trucks while picking our way through the sand. We found a reasonably firm and wide spot in time, and were able to pull to the right as the trucks thundered by at their usual breakneck pace. At Fargo, we turned northeast and followed the Suwanee River 17 miles to its headwaters in the middle of the swamp, driving to the end of SR 177 along John Island, the ridge of an ancient sandbar which now extends just a few feet above swamp level.
We're at Stephen Foster State Park, which has 66 large campsites spread out through the forest, with water and electric hookups. Only four sites are currently occupied, so it's very quiet and peaceful. We're in a tall, open, pine forest, with a thick evergreen undergrowth - palmettos mixed with shrubs and vines that we can't yet identify. We also see occasional live oaks and sweetbay trees - nearly everything around us is evergreen. But if we walk about 100 feet back into the woods behind our campsite, the ground drops almost imperceptibly a foot or two, becoming first spongy and then real swamp, and the pines give way abruptly to bald cypress. We won't be able to go for any long hikes here, unless it's back down the highway.
A big, impressive pileated woodpecker is making the rounds through the treetops around us. I had hoped to catch a glimpse of the rare and endangered red-cockaded woodpecker here, but it's a much smaller bird and will be harder to spot.
1/5 A strong cold front has arrived. The atmosphere is brilliantly clear, but the high for the day is about 50, and it will be in the 30's tonight. It's hard to canoe with gloves (we don't have waterproof gloves), so we rented a small motorboat. Bundled up in warm clothes, with a bright sun, we were quite comfortable as we pottered up and down the Suwanee River, and attempted to explore various tiny waterways which disappear back into the swamp. The water is lower than normal, and we were limited in how far we could get. The river ceases to be worthy of the name about two miles east of us, disintegrating into narrow weed and cypress-choked channels. If the weather cooperates, we'll try it with the canoe tomorrow.
We did get as ar as Billy's Island - site of a large logging camp in the 1920's - where we walked around inspecting the meager remaining artifacts - a small family cemetery from settlers in the early 1900's, bits and pieces of 1920's vehicles, the faint remains of a railroad bed used for moving logs out of the swamp, and some mounds that were apparently made by ancient Indians.
1/6 A bit warmer, but overcast, with occasional rain. Not a good canoeing day, so we were lazy. Dave went for a walk between rain showers - but the opportunities for walking are very limited on this small island.
1/7 We've pretty well used up this place, and it's time to move on. We've been discussing destinations for the past few days, but as of last night, still hadn't decided where to go. There are several people to see and things to do, but they are scattered around Florida somewhat randomly and there is no obviously preferred route. We try to keep our son and daughter apprised of our travel itinerary, but last night when it was time to send out Email, all I could say was "we're headed south. Not sure to where, but we'll let you know when we get there.
This morning, we chose Jacksonville. It's only 65 miles southeast as the crow flies, but over twice that far by road, since we have to retrace our steps west and then skirt around the south end of the swamp. This time, we headed south to I-10, to avoid the sand road. The dry land along this route is almost entirely devoted to tree farms, and has been used this way for many decades. We saw every phase of the growth cycle - from fields that had recently been clear-cut and plowed (showing a furrowed surface of white infertile-looking sand), through small seedlings, to close-spaced rows of tall pines that were ready to harvest.
Occasional small homes appear along the road. As we crossed into Florida, the roadside homes became more frequent, but also abruptly became much larger, more expensively built, and better landscaped. The abrupt transition suggests that Florida is a more desirable place to live than Georgia, at least for affluent people. Why?
In our several crossings of the Georgia-Florida border on these rural roads, we kept seeing border check stations, with signs indicating that trucks, vans, and pickups were to pull in for inspection. We dutifully stopped at each one, but each time, we were waved through without comment by a bored attendant who didn't even come out of his little building. Now, I wish I had gone in and asked some questions. What is the purpose of these border stations, along the sparsely-traveled rural roads? Are RV's supposed to stop?
Driving across Jacksonville with the trailer turned out to be a confusing and tortuous process, complicated by strange traffic patterns, a maze of bridges, bridges under construction, lack of an outer loop expressway around the city, and a lack of adequate expressways into and out of the center of this fairly large metropolis. We made it through reasonably smoothly, with only a couple of unplanned detours after wrong turns, and then found Hanna Park, on the ocean 20 miles to the east, with no difficulty. We'll be staying at this city-operated campground for several days before continuing south.