Trip to Georgetown, FL for fun and fishin'

Day 1: Monday 2/27/2017

We were on the road around 7:45 in the morning.  Our son decided he was going to escort us to the state line.  The weather is beautiful… A great day for traveling.  About fifteen miles into our trip US 15 was shut down for what must have been a bad accident.  We gave hugs and kisses and sent him back home.  The detour was about thirty miles paralleling US 15 but through small towns and low speed limits.  In all we lost about an hour and a half.  This is going to put us in Lumberton, NC right at dark.  Not the best for the first time we have to unload the boat out of the trailer.  But, it is what it is…       

        

The KOA in Lumberton was nice and they assigned us a pull-through site that was 100 feet long!  We could just push the boat out the back and everything would be ready to reload in the morning.  We got a good night’s sleep.

 

Day 2: Tuesday 2/28

We had everything loaded and were southbound around 9:15.  Again another great day on the road.  We arrived at Kingsland, GA (one mile from the FL line) around 4:00 PM.  Plenty of day light to get everything set up.  They also gave us a long site.  All we had to do was pull the front of the boat trailer up to the rear corner of the camper.  At the end of the day even the TV dinners tasted good.  We lucked out because the Carolina’s were forecast to have thunderstorms but we apparently beat them down the road.

 

Day 3: Wednesday 3/1

Microwaveable Jimmy Dean’s for breakfast and load up to hit the road.  We had good traveling the whole trip.  We arrived in Georgetown, FL around 3:30 in the afternoon.  While theoretically impossible; these folks found you really can stuff eight pounds of mud into a five pound bag!  I didn’t remember the camp sites being this small when we check them out last March.  32 RV sites, 7 cabins, 41 slip marina, laundry, office/bait store, maintenance buildings and a boat trailer parking area on about two and a half acres.

 

The people who run the campground are very friendly and helpful.  She even took down the neighbor’s laundry and wash line strung out from their trailer and tied to the pine tree clear across our site.  Oh well you’ll have this in a big city.

 

There was a lot of curiosity about the trailer with a “boat-in-the-box” as one guy put it.  Several of the neighbors came over to check it out after we were set up.

 

Then the neighbor on our right, Doug, warned us about the pit bull that jumped him when he was getting something out of the bed of his pickup.  Suddenly he felt something jump up and grab him around the waist from behind and started chewing on him.  The dog is from the neighbor on our left.  The owner called the dog off and he let go.  Doug mentioned that the dog needs to be on a shorter leash (he’s on about twenty feet of cable). Without any apology the owner said “Well ya don’t have to worry ‘bout nobody bother’n with your truck”.   

 We are too far up stream to have any tidal influence on the river, however, there has been a dry spell in the area and the river is way down.  Like six inches of water in our slip.  This might be a problem.  The docks are fixed (not floating) and it will be about a five and a half foot drop into the boat.  I’m not sure how Linda will make it in and out of the boat.  When she would be standing in the boat her head would be even with the dock.  Oh, I forgot to mention that they assigned us slip number 4.  Our neighbor Doug said that is the slip his boat is in.  They gave him slip number 4, two weeks ago. 

 

This may be an interesting month.  Have you ever noticed how the anticipation is usually better than the reality?

 

Day 4: Thursday 3/2    Temps in the high 70’s.  They have been having record breaking highs.

This morning was a trip to the grocery store.  The closest supermarket is in Crescent City about fifteen miles away.  Winn-Dixie is the old standby in grocery shopping in FL.   In the afternoon I let Linda beat me in a card game of Minus-5.  Actually she whooped my butt.

 

The rain we out ran in the Carolina’s caught up with us this afternoon.  It really poured for about two hours.  Good.  Maybe the river will come back up…Yeah, right.

 

Day 5: Friday 3/3       Temps today to be only in the mid 60’s very windy.

Linda likes to watch House Hunters on TV.  One of the places they featured is Sanford, FL.  That went on the bucket list.  So this morning we set out for Sanford.  The trip took us straight through Deland.  Linda used to go to the courthouse in Deland when she worked land title and abstract work during my college days in Daytona Beach.  Like everything in FL nothing looks the same.  The growth around Deland is staggering. 

 

I lived in Sanford back in 1959.  We lived in a small trailer park on Lake Marion.  Can’t seem to find it…Maybe that’s because the bridge for Interstate 4 is there.  The power plant where my dad built a smokestack has converted from oil to natural gas and the stack has been removed.

We arrived in Sanford at lunch time and found Wolfy’s at the marina on the lake.  They put out a lunch special of smothered chicken, mashed taters, and a vegie medley. As Andy Griffith would have said “It was GooOOOood!

 

Sanford is a beautiful town.  The lakefront has been turned into a beautiful park that must be

about a mile long.  The old down town section has fancy brick inlayed crosswalks and the town is neat and tidy.  Nothing was as I remembered it. (Hey, that was nearly 60 years ago… I can’t recall what we had for breakfast this morning)

I have a second cousin, Jeanie and her husband Mike who moved to Sanford about five years ago to work with a youth group.  They fell in love with the town.  We can see why.

From Sanford we headed east on I-4 to Daytona.  We drove up to the outlets for some shopping then to Ormond Beach.  We found the trailer park we lived in back in the early 70’s.  Yep, it’s still there.  Then we drove down to the beach so Linda could walk along the water and listen to the waves kiss the shore.

 

It’s about an hour drive back to Georgetown and we just beat the rush hour back to the camper.  All in all a great day.

 
This evening I tried to add pictures but this WIFI is WAYSLOW (when it works at all) and won't upload them.  Life is Good.