Carabelle to Destin

Convival and easy-going as Ho-Hum was, after two days of the Gulf breeze we decided to move west a bit and try our luck in Destin, where the famous sand dunes might provide a little shelter.

We pulled out in glorious sunshine and for the first hour or so the 98 wound along the coast through sleepy little towns with crab shacks and scuba dive rentals on the Main St, and the odd art gallery chock full of the pent up creativity of the retirees living along the shore.

After Apiachicola, the road widened and we drove through a section of the usual North American strip mall awfulness. Mile after mile of car dealerships. Walmarts, KMarts, Targets, Taco Bell, Dunkin’ Donuts, interspersed with the odd low framed building offering discreet plastic surgery services or real estate opportunities.  Then the road narrowed again and we passed through some bedraggled looking scrub land.

Then the whole strip mall thing started in earnest. With no breaks. Every couple of miles a signpost to the left would remind us that the reason for all the commerce, the astonishingly beautiful beach that is the Gulf, lay six blocks to our south, completely hidden from view.

After we had passed the point of being completely inconsolable, we turned left at an enormous Walmart and drove down through some dunes and were suddenly in Destin State Park.  How this place has survived is a miracle and I am glad we stayed there if for no other reason.

It was nestled into what appear to be the last remaining two miles of sand dunes in Northern Florida. Presumably the Walmart will hold back the encroaching waters.

Each site was surrounded by a deep and high thicket of scrub pine, rosemary and other aromatics. It blocked the breeze but not the sound of the highway.  A boardwalk through the dunes took us onto the beach and there it was silent. The sand was perfectly white and crunched like icing sugar under our feet.  A pelican landed in the water and appeared to be studying us. Even here, nature finds a way.

We turned left and walked two miles down the beach. It was lined with concrete condominiums and Private Property Keep Off signs. We found an exit off the beach and wandered through the streets. Block after block of haciendas of various sizes, shapes and colours, all apparently boarded up for the winter. Occasionally we passed a couple of local women out walking. They were all dressed the same. Oversized college sweater, skinny yoga pants, Uggs.

We went back to the beach and walked two miles in the opposite direction. The same, but high rise. No restaurants, no bars, no little souvenir shops, no ice cream stalls.  They were all out on the highway.

We gave up and went back to our site and ate dinner outside and listened to the roar of the traffic and then went to bed, defeated by Florida.

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.

Atlantic to the Gulf Coast

We got up early to drive all day to the Gulf Coast.  Our route took us down through the Georgia lumber belt, and we mostly took country roads, so we met a lot of B-trains heading to the mills we saw along the coast.

We swung west and then south around the Okefanokee Swamp, the eighth wonder of Georgia, but I could not persuade Himself to spend the night there. He has the 'gator fear.  Too many episodes of Swamp Critter.

Soon we were south enough that we had left the pines behind mostly. I loved their girth and the faint smell in the air everywhere. The little towns we passed through were text book small town America - obviously struggling to keep up with the rest of the world. The houses were either pleasant brick bungalows with deep porches and shady oaks, or very ramshackle trailers by the side of the road. There didn't seem to be an in-between option for the upwardly mobile. The smaller the town, the more grandiose its civic buildings appeared to be. Courthouse, Sheriff's department, the odd library or post office. The schools all look like prisons, really grim affairs with no windows.

I only counted seven Confederate flags while in Georgia. I gave up counting pawn shops after 65. There were at least two in every community. As we drew south, PAWN was replaced by GUNS/ PAWN and there were shooting ranges everywhere.

And churches. Big, small, grandiose, simple, modern, pioneer style, under trees, on hill tops, in strip malls, set back in gardens. Churches everywhere. Exhorting the tardy Christian to get to know the Lord. Not one of them looked in need of a lick of paint either.

Funny that.

The Lord provides I guess.

We quit Georgia shortly after stopping in Quitman for cheap gas and a fried dinner at J and J's Chicken. The carpark was full to bursting with farm trucks and the little shack was crowded with hungry farm workers eating chicken and shooting the breeze with each other in a totally incomprehensible Southern drawl.

After that, we passed through their rich farmland, interspersed with swamps steaming after a recent rain storm. Huge green pastures rolled into the distance. Big beef cattle stood under magnificent oak trees. If it wasn't for the Spanish moss I could have been in Tipperary. A Tipperary on steroids though.

We hit the Gulf close to nightfall and found the Ho Hum RV park, located on the beach. Dog friendly. No kids allowed. My kinda place.

Skidaway Island to Jekyll Island

We left Skidaway Island on a warm sunny morning and headed out on the I95, the snowbird highway, south along the Georgia coast. As soon as we could, we exited onto the coastal highway. In Eulonia, Himself stopped to get a pulled pork sandwich (Georgia pork = great pork) and I mooched around PeachWorld while he ate.

As well as offering every possible way to consume peaches - peach cobbler in Mason jars, peach syrup, peach bread, dried peaches, smoked peaches, peach jam, you get my drift, the store had a large selection of hot sauces.  I walked out with a bottle of Moonshine Madness Bourbon BBQ sauce, some Butt Burner hot sauce and a Deer in the Headlights hot sauce.  And half a pound of homemade fudge.

We meandered down along the coast to Darien. The Dualle people first settled this region. Based on a bluff high above the Altamaha river, presumably they fished the river and caught fiddler crabs and swamp rabbits in the wide wetlands on either bank. There wasn't anything on the bluff that told us what they were like or how they lived. Instead, there was a reconstruction of Fort King George, the southernmost outpost of the British Empire on the American coastline, dating from the 1720s.

It was a small mean huddle of buildings, surrounded by a low palisade.  There was a look out tower and block house, living quarter ranging from adequate to basic, an outhouse and a forge. A grim place in which to end your days for the 140 soldiers who died here over a five year period. Mostly from swamp fever, but occasionally killed in skirmishes with the Spanish, or the indigenous people who had lost the bluff to the newcomers.

Standing at their graves under a huge live oak tree, I wondered what they must have thought of the prospect of dying here in an alligator-infested swamp at the end of the world, defending King and country and the business interests behind that glorious calling.

After their presence was secured, the British brought in a group of Scots to settle the area and carve a lumber industry out of the cypress forests along the river.  A band saw blade in the museum measured at least 30' across.  What those forests must have looked like.....

According to the Fort commander, the Scots were very industrious as long as they were kept away from the rum supplies.  He must have had it locked up tight, because they built a sawmill, a railway to and from the river. Hell, they changed the course of the river to suit their needs, digging a short cut between two points of a bow.  They built a pretty little brick town along the river where their descendants still live today.

We continued down 17S to the coast.  It was flat, flat land. Acres of wetland stretched across to a calm Atlantic, with the Golden Islands slung low and blue in the distance.  We crossed a long high bridge to Brunswick.  The city seemed to be comprised solely of retirement condos. Row upon row upon row of identical concrete villas, interspersed with health centres and pharmacies and the odd golf store. I'm not sure I'd want to end my days there.

The islands are beautiful though. We stayed in the campground at the northern end of Jekyll Island.  We hiked down to the water at one end of Driftwood beach.

The beach is iconic and with good reason. It wraps a good two miles around the northern tip of the island. It backs onto pine trees.  The ocean is gradually eroding away the land. As the undergrowth and then the soil is washed away, the roots of the trees are gradually emerging from what's left.  Eventually each tree is felled.  They litter the beach, blacked twisted shadows of themselves. Stumps stick out of the white sand like rotten teeth. Huge trunks are shriveled into contorted shapes by the salt water.

The combination of endless white sand and endless calm water, interspersed with these tree sculptures was visually very haunting. Like wandering through a dystopic installation in some great outdoor galleria.

Further down the road, Sunny Optimism in the Face of Climate Change was busy at work as men and machines carved a new resort out of the sea level woodlands.

After it got dark, we went to eat at the Bistro, a short stroll from the campsite. Apparently, all the Golden Girls of this Golden Isle were having their pre-Christmas meet up there. We were surrounded by a dizzying array of elaborately styled white hair. Quite a few of the ladies had that strange featureless forehead that comes with having the Botox guy on speed dial.  The few men in attendance just looked like normal old men. It's ghastly what us women do to ourselves.

As we ate our blackened crab and fried green tomatoes, I eavesdropped like crazy on everyone's Christmas plans. The wine-fueled chatter was deafening in any case. It seemed like everyone was either STAYING or VISITING for Christmas. It was difficult to figure out which had more social clout. VISITING, by a nose I think. VISITING A SON IN ATLANTA definitely so.

The Bistro sold wine for $12 a bottle so things got very shrill after about 40 minutes and everyone's plans got repeated quite a few times for the benefit of those who were hard of hearing or out of touch with their short term memory.

At 8pm some inaudible to me seniors' klaxon must have sounded, because they rose as one to pay their bills, fight over the wine bill, and clamour to wish Richard the waiter the happiest of Christmases. There was a flurry of air-kissing and back-slapping and the restaurant suddenly emptied.

We all took a breath. Richard found a bottle of rum.

'Are you STAYING or VISITING, Richard', I asked.

'I'm from Michigan. I go home in August.'

Later on we wandered back to our campsite through the pine trees. Everyone was tucked up inside on a beautiful night. Someone had forgotten to turn off their Christmas inflatibles and they waved sadly at us as we finished the $12 wine Richard had bagged for us to take home. Then we went to bed too.

A day in the Garden of Good and Evil, Savannah

When Sherman captured Savannah at the end of his March to the Sea in December 1864, he wrote to Lincoln and offered the city to him as a Christmas gift. Lincoln accepted, and the city was saved.

The city had been founded and planned by the British in 1750, the same time as Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the twenty two squares that run back from the waterfront in three lines are maintained in all their splendour to this day by a Committee of Appropriateness, concerned citizens who vote on any changes to a property deemed historic.

We started at the riverfront. The old Cotton Exchange is still the most prominent building on the water. The Factor's Walk behind River St is still cobbled with the ballast stones from British ships sent over to collect cotton.  Vast fortunes were made and lost at the Exchange as Europeans speculators tried to bet on the harvest.

We walked down through some of the squares to the old cemetery. During the Civil War, the federal soldiers ransacked the graves and slept in them. Knocked over headstones and moved them around so much that the city couldn't put them all back correctly. They were used to build a long high wall that marks the boundary of the site.

On our way through we were accosted by an elderly self-styled preacher man who shook us down for a few bucks and performed a loud and enthusiastic Praise Jesus renewal of our wedding vows.  The other tourists scuttled past, relieved.

We recovered in Clary's (made famous in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) eating Georgia honey pecan waffles with a side of bacon.

Walking down each street of the city is a pleasure and a surprise. Tall live oaks curve over the road and meet to create a dome of green shade. Spanish moss drapes down through the leaves and branches. Each house has its own features: a wrought iron railing; different coloured brick work to highlight architectural features, a porthole window or a secret courtyard.

The squares all have a garden in the centre. Azaleas and rose bushes intertwine, and there are benches to sit on.  The most famous of these is in Chippewa Square, which is the bench that Forrest Gump sits on when he recounts his tale of life.

Every square has a fountain or a statue of some long lost soldier in the centre. They love to mourn their military dead in Savannah. I didn't see any memorials to the people who made the bricks to build the houses, or who underpinned the economy that created the extraordinary wealth that resulted in this architectural beauty.

We continued on down to the park to find the Canadian made Memorial to the Confederate dead. Commissioned by the wives and sisters of the fallen, it was shipped south on the promise that it would not touch Northern soil on the way down.

A soldier stands on top of a tall slender obelisk. He is facing North, towards his enemy. He looked lonely up there.

It's difficult to put into words how beautiful Savannah is. Despite three fires, it has survived its history with its splendour intact.  When you compare it to Halifax, it is easy to see the impact of the cotton industry.  But if you took away the brickwork and those live oaks that grow so huge in the Georgia sun, the cities aren't that different.

As we drove back to our campsite on Skidaway Island I had some fun imagining who would sit on a Halifax Committee of Appropriateness. And how much I would hate such a gathering of citizenry.

Plains to Savannah, Georgia

We left Little Ocumglee State Park and the searingly obvious hostility between the park rangers in their pick ups and the management company staff in their golf carts (I know who I’d bet on in the long run) and headed north to Dublin just so I could say I was there. 

Then we skipped onto to I16 and we were in Savannah in two hours. We’re staying in a State Park on Skidaway Island. This time the Spanish moss is draping down from enormous live oak trees (they don’t lose all their leaves in winter) and the undergrowth seems to be comprised mostly of exotic palm trees that have escaped a botanical gardens somewhere. The azaleas have disappeared. Other than that the landscape is very like our own beloved Eastern Shore. Mud flats and grass tussocks and little ridges of pine and lots of water.

We headed into the city and took the trolley tour around the various squares and districts to acquaint ourselves for tomorrow’s all day walkathon. Nette was our driver and tour guide. She drove a large unwieldy trolley round the narrow streets and squares of the city like it was a mini all the while reciting the tour in a flat monotone drawl, born of 7,000 recitations.

The city was founded in 1750 by a grant from George II, who wanted some settlers in place to protect the existing port of Charleston from the Spanish further down the coast. The city was planned in England to be a series of twenty squares laid out in a grid.

Many of you will know the city from ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil’. Nette showed us the room in the house on where the murder/ not murder took place.  You might also know Chippewa Square as the site where Forrest Gump pronounced that life’s like a box of chocolates.

If neither of those cultural references grab you, Savannah is the city that gave us Paula Deen, and you can do a Paula Deen trolley tour with buffet dinner at Lady and Sons restaurant. Nette pointed out the restaurant.

She also showed us the two guns captured from Cornwallis’ army by George Washington, which were presented to the city after the Revolutionary War.

Different Cornwallis I know, but we could for sure borrow one and blow up that goddamned statue down by the train station in Halifax and be done with it.

Atlanta to Plains, Georgia

Fred had agreed to wait a little longer at the Cruise America pick up site in Palmetto, a bungalow suburb south of Atlanta. As it happened, all our flights from Halifax went well and our taxi didn’t get lost and so he only lost an hour of his day. Most of that hour he spent complaining about how Cruise America wouldn’t pay him to upgrade their RVs with a few simple innovations.

"See that table top there. I do custom coach work. If I could put just a couple of cupholder dents in those tables, y’all would save so much money on cleaning those seats. But no. Cruise America won’t listen. They been in business for forty years now, and they know best."

He took us on a leisurely tour of our new home. Y’all bells and whistles.

Did we watch the video?

Yes, we did.

He handed us the keys and disappeared round the side of a building and suddenly we were alone.

Alrighty then.

We cruised down the I85 towards Columbus. Swung around the city and crossed the Alabama border and pulled into a Walmart in Phenix City to buy camp chairs and some supplies.

A guy strolled over to us in the parking lot. Admired our RV. Asked us where we were going.

"Florence Marina State Park tonight."

"It’s nice there. Good fishing. They have alligators now though. Never had them before. It’s a shame."

I didn’t dare look at Himself. I could feel the change in blood pressure. He has the 'gator fear. Too many episodes of Swamp Critters.

The Walmart had everything we needed to provision for our trip. Everything. Including craft beer. And Columbia Valley merlot.

We continued down through Alabama before swinging back into Georgia and our site. Farming country, mostly, interspersed with tiny communities.  They were closed up or for sale mostly, except for pawn shops and CHEAP CIGS BEER stores and the odd gas station.

Our first campsite was in among stately pines draped in Spanish moss. Which is neither Spanish nor moss, and is the home of the original bed bug. Early English settlers used Spanish moss to fill their mattresses, and the ensuing itch is the origin of the ‘Night night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite’ rhyme.

Next morning we meandered over to Providence Canyon. Settlers in the 1800s cleared the land of its pine forest and ground cover, and after a while the spring rains washed away the sandy soil and then kept washing. Long after the settlers had moved on to better opportunities, the soft chalk was eaten down over 100 feet in a wide area, creating remarkable canyons. The colours range from a deep burgundy red through all the pinks to a brilliant white, with striking buttes and a red clay bottom, through which the remains of the creek still meanders.

We wandered through six or seven of the canyons. It was very humid. The ground cover was reasserting itself on the canyon floor.  Pine trees and glorious azaleas and wild berries of some description. But it was silent. No birds. No insects.

We headed east some more. Through farmland mostly. Wide peanut fields that were empty after the harvest. Fields and fields of cotton. The plants died back, cotton clinging to them all, even after harvest. Cotton blew across the road and lined the ditches. I got out and collected some. So soft, but tangled up in every boll are spiky twigs of the plant. They hurt my fingers.

We drove on through miles more of it. Millions of plants. Each needing watering. Hundreds of bolls on each plant. Each needing picking.

I don’t know how a person could ever look across a cotton field under the Georgia sky and not immediately understand the enormity of the evil of slavery.

We fetched up in Plains, home of Jimmy and Roslynn Carter. It was a Sunday so he was teaching Sunday school, but we didn’t attend. There wasn’t much going on in Plains if you weren’t at church. We moped around the dollar store, picked up soap and sunglasses. Asked the clerk about somewhere to eat.

‘Somewhere to eat in Plains, Georgia on a bright Sunday morning? I guess you’re shit out of luck there.’

Kelly wasn’t too happy with her lot in life I don’t think.

We wandered down East Main St. The street comprises the old peanut warehouse built by Carter’s father. Now it’s an upmarket inn, with specialty stores on the ground floor.

Store one was the Bobby Salter’s Plain Peanuts and General Store, which sold the best peanut butter icecream in the world.  It was pretty good alright. In amongst the roasted, ground, baked, sweetened and broiled peanuts, the peanut teeshirts, badges, tote bags, key chains, Christmas decorations, and everything else, we found a can of Creamed Possum with Sweet Potatoes Garnished in Coon Fat Gravy which unfortunately we were not allowed to purchase.

It belonged to my grandma, it’s not going anywhere.

We moved on to Store 2, the Greatest Collection of Political Memorabilia in the South.  My kind of store.  The Donald Trump for President 2016 were just inside the door.  

"They’re outselling everything right now", the owner said. "They come in here with their ideas and no sense of humour and if they buy a Trump button, I tell them my Sarah Palin joke."

I asked if he would tell it to me for a Feel the Bern button.

"Okay then, why did Sarah Palin keep putting quarters in the Coke machine?

Cos she was winning!"

As he laughed himself into a coughing fit I poked around this treasure trove of political memorabilia. Every button, bumper sticker and poster you can think of was there, all the way back to Eisenhower.  

He had a collection of pre-WW2 buttons for sale in a glass case.

Eventually a little knot of liberals self-organised around the Bernie buttons to discuss Trump.

‘We love your new President, Mr. Trudeau, don’t we honey’, said one half of an elderly couple from Minnesota.  ‘Did you vote for him?’

We didn’t bother to explain.

‘If Trump wins, we’re moving to Ireland’ said the other half of the couple. ‘We were there recently, we loved it.’

‘He’s no Jimmy Carter’, I said.

I have a theory. There’s a generation of decent, hardworking, lifelong liberal American voters who got beat down by the inflation and interest rates of the seventies. They had bills to pay. When Reagan came along with his low taxes, they took one chance to vote for their own interests. Buried Jimmy Carter. And unleashed the political force that has found its purest form in Donald Trump. And they are horrified and they blame themselves.

Those busloads of boomers who fetch up in Plains Georgia every Sunday are coming looking for forgiveness.

‘He took my hand and said he was glad I made the trip’, one of them told me.

‘He was too honest to get re-elected’, I offered.

‘He was.’

We fetched up in Little Ocumglee State Park which has been privatised and which I don’t think I liked too much, but there were pine trees and we lit a fire and drank the rest of the craft beer and talked about Cornwallis and the colonies and looked forward to Savannah the next day.