We got the bird!

Florida is behind us now. We arrived in Georgia Yesterday after spending a couple of days in St. Augustine.

St. Augustine is another touristy town, in the league with New Orleans and Key West. In each of these places you will find that a certain type of business is dominate. In New Orleans the dominant store is the tacky souvenir shop. In Key west by far the local bar is dominant. In Saint Augustine it is the museum.

Let me give you a partial list of the St. Augustine museums:

         The Pirate and Treasure Museum

         The Oldest House Museum

         Ripley’s Believe it or not Museum

         The Light House Museum

         The Lightner Museum

         The Villa Zorayda Museum

         The Fort Museum

         The St Augustine History Museum

         The Wax Museum

And I could go on and on. We got tired of going to museums just driving through St. Augustine.

A street in St. Augustine

Brenda doing s favorite thing in St. Augustine.

All in all, we liked St. Augustine. It is historically very interesting and is actually a quaint town. We spent two days at the Anastasia State Park there. The sites were beautiful with lots of space between sites.

We even went to the Alligator Farm there and enjoyed it! (They have a natural bird rookery there that you walk through.)

Brenda in the Rookery at the Alligator Farm, St. Augustine, FL.

Our drive from there to Folkston, Georgia, and the Okeefenokee Swamp was 92 miles. This is about the perfect day drive. We left St. Augustine at about 10 AM and were in Folkston at about noon.

I saw an RV Campground on the internet at Folkston I thought looked nice. We drove right to it. It did not look nice. We stopped in front of it. A shed was falling apart on the right. The narrow mud rutted driveway led between two sick pine trees into a grass field. One oldish travel trailer was back there. We drove a few blocks away to where we could look at the Woodall’s camping guide and find something decent.

 Brenda got into the trailer and I was sitting there at the wheel, thinking, when there is this rapping against the window. A fat fellow without a shirt is there on a bike getting my attention. He is the owner of the “RV Park” we passed up and he really would like us to, "look at it at least". I wasn’t too interested. When Brenda came back to the car she asked how much it cost. “Full hook-ups $15 per night. I was quite interested. We followed the guy back and it actually wasn’t bad and the price was just right so, that is where we are.

The owner of this “RV Park” is a dreamer. And he is clueless. 

He wants to put in cottages for older people in the back where he also wants to put in fishponds, more RV spaces and what else, who knows. All this on 10 acres.

At the entrance he is building a pizza place. He learned how to make pizza in Hawaii. He was doing the framing for the postage stamp sized slab. He won’t serve beef because he is scared of mad cow disease.  

As were setting up he is telling us all this and then asks,  “Do you think I should pour a concrete driveway?” 

Clueless!!

Our RV Site in the South Eastern RV Park, Folkston, GA.

After setting up we drove into the Okeefenokee. This is a different type of swamp. This is fresh water with cypress trees. At least there are some cypress trees growing back after the loggers took the old ones out. It is a pretty place and well worth visiting. We took a boat ride this morning and will take another at sunset tonight. I’ll stick a few pictures of the swamp in this blog.

Okeefenokee Cypress Swamp.

Lillies in the Swamp

Water Lilly

GREAT NEWS!!!!!  We finally, after over 1,000 miles of searching have seen the unremarkable Red-cockaded Woodpecker. We got the bird this morning along with three other life birds. This is a great swamp! Now life may become even more relaxed. (The other three life birds were: the Eastern Red Sided Towhee, The Eastern Screech Owl, and the Bob White).