At the Ho-Hum on the Gulf Coast

Our first night in Florida was a little chilly. The aftermath of a storm meant a breeze coming in off the Gulf of Mexico. We had fetched up in the Ho-Hum RV Park outside a little hippie town called Carabelle, on the Florida panhandle.

Ho Hum sat on about two acres of seafront. It was populated mostly by early retirees who were driving their earthly goods around the continent of North America. There were a couple of smaller RVs like ours, but we huddled shabbily amongst the gleaming chrome of our neighbours, like the beneficiaries at a glitzy fundraiser.

They were settled onto the Gulf for a month at least, most of them. There were porches or awnings of various colours and fabrics, and soft outdoor rugs thrown over the gravel. Everyone had a truck or a jeep or a Buick parked alongside, and a couple of motorbikes. And a boat. And some bicycles.

And everyone had at least one dog.

The dogs were walked in a slow circle around the campsite at least three times a day. Dogs like to say hello to me, and I was slap bang on the waterfront, so I met just about everyone. It was a convival couple of days.

In front of me, if I got bored of watching the routines of Ho-Hum was the Gulf of Mexico, glittering emerald blue as far as I could see.

“Why didn’t you bring your own dogs” asked Carla the owner, when I mentioned I had two. “We love dogs at Ho-Hum. No kids allowed.”

My neighbour on my left was a retired navy guy from upstate New York who had sold up and was visiting every state in America. He had a lot of faded tattoos and a pony tail and he loved the books of John Steinbeck so we got along. I asked him had he read “Travels with Charley”, the book that did more for my travel itch than most anything else.

“Many times. On long voyages.”

“I got this pup here at the shelter down the road three weeks ago. She’s going to live on the road with me now.”

The leggy, skinny, brindled beauty with one blue eye and one brown one sat at our feet chewing on a pig’s ear. Oblivious to her luck in the lottery of forever homes.

“I was going to call her Charley, but then I called her Cat instead.”

“A dog called Cat, huh?”

“Yep.”

I let it slide. We stood in the breezy sunshine and looked at her a while. A pine cone fell from a tree beside us and Cat leaped on it with all the joy of her youth and our undivided attention.

Later on, Himself and I walked the beach aways. There were clam holes everywhere and oyster shells and the shells of dead fish that I didn’t recognise.

Beyond the narrow beach there were slender two and three story wood frame houses, balanced precariously on four high posts. To prevent flooding presumably, as the houses were no more than six feet above sea level.

They were pretty though, painted in pastel colours with wide shuttered windows and decks on the roofs of many of them. They were mostly closed up for the winter and it was very quiet along the shore. Not even a wave.

As the sun began to fall, a truck with local plates pulled up alongside Ho-Hum and a man got out and pulled a large net from the back and waded out into the water with it. He cast it out in a spiralling movement, over and over again. Every now and again he bent to it and pulled a fish out and put it in a bag he had slung over his shoulder.

“Snappers” said Dennis, master of Ho-Hum, who had joined me on the little pier that stretched out into the ocean from the campsite. “He does this every night till he has enough for dinner and then he goes home again.”

After the man left, everyone gathered on the little pier and sat and watched the sun sink down through coral and mauve and pink and into a ferocious red that lit the whole bay aflame for a couple of glorious minutes and then it was suddenly the deep blue of nightfall that you only see in that part of the world.

After dark Ho-Hum was a most convival affair. Unlike the State Parks where everybody keeps to themselves more or less, private campgrounds are more sociable. Maybe it’s the wifi. There’s more pressure to have a good time. I don’t know. I just know it’s the same everywhere I camp.

The neighbours on our right hand side were from London, Ontario. He had run a car dealership and she had worked in the police department and they had checked out at 52. They invited us round for coconut cocktails and a tour of their motor home.

If Corbusier had invented motorhomes he would have designed that one. They are hand built in Michigan somewhere. Italian appliances. German electronics. Solar powered. It was a thing of beauty and it had a king sized bed.

“You must have sold a lot of cars in your day”, I said.

“I did.”

We had more coconut cocktails and he expounded on the art of the sale, as all great salesmen do, mesmerised as they are by the way they can reel us in and part us from our money. And like all great salesmen he was very entertaining and honest in his own way and it was quite a while before we left the splendour of our surroundings and bedded down in our suddenly shabby Cruise America rental.