Silence in Florida

I sit now, an early Tuesday morning finally in silence. There is thick treed forest surrounding me, Sandy and Dusty are asleep. The small state park- called Suwannee River State Park is 20 miles from the Georgia border and so quiet it makes you want to breathe without sound. The trees are mixed leaf and needle. One is like a red pine, but the needles are 12” long. There is something flowing off many of the trees. On the ride through the forest to the park at the 2am last night, I watched it wave in the breeze off the trees as they over hung the road. It instantly reminded me of the rain forests of Vancouver Island. Most of the trees carried a thick flowing moss. As I see it closely now it doesn’t look like moss.

            We drove yesterday through the entire state of Georgia. At a gas station I walked the pup and found a huge field and let her run. She took off like a shot and not listening to my calls made a grand circle through the grass and started to return. She was so into her run that she didn’t see a 40-foot high netting fence. She hit it full tilt and bounced, into the air and hit the grass on her back. She got up and looked at me as if to say, “Did anyone get the license number of that Rottweiler?” It started to get late, but somehow I really wanted to make it onto our target state. We drove realizing that of the 25 books we got from AAA, none of them covered camping. There is supposed to be a state park nearby, but the maps are not clear. We stopped at a rest stop and of course everything was closed. We peered into the glass doors of the 20,000 square foot information center to no avail. I was walking out when I asked a maintenance worker if it was okay to park and sleep in the lot where the trucks park. “They do it all the time,” She said. And so we moved the RV to the edge of the parking lot, locked the doors and pulled the shades looking forward to a fine night sleep. There were a few trucks; there engines idling as they do, on the other side of the lot, but things were good and we hit the sack. Sandy and I both woke at the same time- 2am- with the sound of jet engines. The parking lot of semis had filled up. It was pretty clear that there was no more sleep here. 

Dashboard Dog!

     We drove off; blinking off the sleep we had had in search of more. 20 miles later we drove into this beautiful state park. At 2am it was beautiful because of its solitude. Now in the morning I see its visual beauty. We will sort our stuff today, all the boxes and bags thrown into the RV in the cold Iowa winter. Now in the warm Florida winter we will set up water and make order for the months ahead.