Feb. 23: Okefenokee Swamp, home of the Pogo comic strip, is a national park in Georgia. We decided to camp in the Laura S. Walker State Park, which has a small lake. Actually, it was a bit of a mix-up: the Okefenokee Swamp Park, which is a private non-profit, is close to the State Park, while the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge is quite a bit further down the road. However, we have really enjoyed our time here.
Since leaving North Carolina, most of our trip has been through the Atlantic coastal plain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_coastal_plain). This area is low-lying and pretty flat. The soils are sandy, as befits land that was once seashore. There are a lot of marshy areas, including Okefenokee and Congaree, as well as the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, which we visited in 2013. Traveling through this area, it is easy to imagine that relatively small changes in sea level could dramatically affect the southeastern landscape.
Laura Walker State Park has the possibly unique feature of incorporating a championship 18-hole golf course, as well as the lake and hiking trails. It is far from any major light sources, so with clear skies and a new moon, we have had spectacular night skies. It is also quite warm. This park seems to be the northern edge of the winter range of the invasive Canadian snowbird – in just a couple of days we have met several people from various parts of Ontario, Nova Scotia and Manitoba.
State parks have some pros and cons as RV campsites. The campsites themselves tend to be larger, prettier and (sometimes) more private than private parks. They generally have only a couple of dozen sites. As well, because the sites can only be occupied by the same camper for 14 days in a season, they attract recreational campers, both local and touring. This tends to make them more social. On the con side, the parks seldom have sewer hookups, which means that we have to be careful with water use or face packing up so we can go to the dump site. We decided to use the campground showers, but this proved to be insufficient. For the last few days of our stay, we tried to minimize dishes and I washed the ones we did use in the laundry facility.
With daytime temperatures reaching the mid-80s, we can no longer leave Rumple in the car when we are sightseeing. Unfortunately, we discovered here that the RV air-conditioning does not work. The RV heats up more slowly than the car, but it still gets 5 – 10 degrees above ambient temperature. So, until the air-conditioner gets fixed, our daytime activities have had to be dog-friendly.
With alligator warning signs on all the lakes, we are a bit leery of taking Rumple in the kayak. A circuit of Laura Walker Lake takes about an hour, so we are kayaking in the late afternoon, when the temperatures are cooler (and Rumple is ready for a nap).
We have made a number of friends here. Judy and Ron live in Grimsby ON on our regular route to Toronto, and we will likely visit them in the summer. They were kind enough to watch Rumple one warm afternoon so we could kayak at Okefenokee. David is a former symphony percussionist, later a high school teacher, and most recently provincial curling coach and canoe builder from NS. We hope to visit him, as well. And Sharyn is from Restoule in northern ON. We also had long chats with Brad and Connie from Oregon. The warm weather and the calm lake seems to encourage people to chat.