We survived another cold night but the rangers sure were worried about the pipes freezing as they turned on all kinds of taps to flow and they started doing this at 10 am! The morning sunrise was spectacular and we were the only people in the Clark loop section of the campground. As we headed south we saw lots of mansions in each town like this museum called Shorter Mansion. We also saw lots of places selling boiled peanuts (which we haven’t tried yet) and in Dothan the area for the National Peanut Festival was huge. Must be something to see, unfortunately we missed the festival by a month. Next we entered in to Florida.

We wanted to stay in the Florida Caverns State Park but they had floods from rain the week before so were still closed for the cleanup. We went to Three Rivers State Park instead and it turned out to be perfect timing. A group of Vintage Trailer campers were having a rally there and they were completely decked out for Christmas. We walked around to see the Christmas lights at night and then were woken up at 5:52 am to the sound of gunshots as duck season opened that day! On Saturday you could tour the trailers and some of them were even fully costumed to match their vintage trailer decoration scheme. Everyone was incredibly friendly and glad to show you around the trailers. They ranged from a 1955 two storey trailer all the way down to small pop ups! What amazing luck to stumble on this rally.

The Grinch

After the tours we did an 8 km hike on 4 different self-guided interpretative trails, Lakeview, Dry Creek, Eagle, and Ridge. The trails were all close to Lake Seminole which was the dividing point between Eastern and Central time. On these trails we saw a mixed pine forest with some interesting Magnolia trees and a tree called the Hackberry which had cork like bumps all over the bark. There were also lots of dry creek beds, white tailed deer, Gopher Tortoise holes (didn’t see the actual tortoises) and interesting red clay bead ant colonies.

That night we tried out our new table top BBQ and it worked great and the next day we drove to an RV park on Lake Talquin so we could get Wi-Fi access and do laundry (thanks to Murray & Jen for the RV Ladder drying rack). We’re also finally out of the cold weather as night time temps will be around 12 C this week.