The river. Very low, it’s been really dry. The big ropey looking trees are Bald Cypress. Fascinating trees. Parts will die off and rot away while the rest is fine! One was hollow and full of mud
Campsite full of questionable choices. Also bad judgement. There was a burn ban and they tried to cook.with a charcoal grill. Idiots. I think the rangers put a stop to it
It’s a beautiful park with very clean facilities. Showers each have their own room. Camp sites with tent platform, picnic bench, potable water, electricity outlet.
Lots of animals and the river is very close to the camp sites.
It seemed like a really cool place the last time I went there. Lemme see…that was in 1976, so I was 7. Yeah, I can see how maybe my recollection might not be that accurate.
It sounded pretty stripped out and there weren’t other children to befriend. They might try one of the crystal places. She might feel differently with her cousins to dig with. The ones with active mines dumping new hauls every so often.
The discussion about Yugos over in the car thread briefly veered into travel to then Yugoslavia. Here’s my Yugoslavia travel story:
Mid-1980s. I was a high school exchange student in then West Germany. At the end of the school year there was a few weeks before my exchange year ended, so I went with my host family and some of their friends on vacation to the Chalkidiki Peninsula in northern Greece, three families driving together convoy-style from Rheinland-Pfalz through Austria to Ljubljana to catch the overnight car train to Skopje, then driving on to Greece. We crossed the border from Austria into Yugoslavia at a tiny little border crossing, maybe two guys in a mountain hut with an actual crossbar over the road. It looked like a movie set. They had no idea what to do with my USA passport, don’t think they had ever seen one before. They conferred for a few minutes, shrugged, and stamped something into it. Easy peasy, right?
Well, no. On the way back, crossing from Greece into Yugoslavia at the BIG border crossing along the main highway with many lanes of traffic things got interesting. The Yugoslavian border officer took our group’s stack of passports, saw mine, and immediately waved our car out of line. He spoke a very little broken German, so the best we could figure out was that I couldn’t enter Yugoslavia without a visa and my transit two weeks earlier had been illegal. He called his supervisor over, and a large angry man in a fancier uniform stomped out of the air-conditioned office building across the many lanes of border traffic and proceeded to yell at all of us in Serbian? Macedonian? as he waved my passport at my host dad. Then he turned on his heel and marched off WITH MY PASSPORT back toward the office building. My 17-year-old self watched my passport disappearing, then ran after him, dodging cars and getting yelled at by drivers and my host family.
I was allowed into the waiting room but couldn’t communicate to the desk clerk why I was there. In retrospect it was of course completely obvious why I was there, since Angry Supervisor had come in and I could hear him yelling behind the partition wall through the clerk’s transaction window, but at the time I wasn’t thinking very calmly. (Also, I was 17.) Just as my host dad came in, Angry Supervisor came up to the window with my passport and proceeded to angrily stamp several pages of the correct transit visa for a USAian into my passport, almost threw it at me, and angrily waved me out of the waiting room with big angry “shooing” motions. Host dad tried to ask about visa fees, but the clerk waved us off too (amused, not angry), so we said a bunch of Dankeschöns and zipped out of there back to the car and back on the road to Skopje to catch the car train headed north.
So that’s how I transited Yugoslavia, once illegally and once not.
Wow. I don’t have any fun stories like that. The closest I have is when my friends insisted that we saw Michael Schumacher pass us on the highway between Ventimiglia and Nice because he had a very special custom Ferrari. It did sound amazing through the tunnel.
