Bill and Cathy McArthur on the Road 2004: 21

On Monday, April 26, we awoke at 5:00 AM in order to get an early start to deal with the infamous Atlanta rush hour. Son Bill and Stacey had already been up for some hours solving a software problem in Switzerland (remotely). It was raining very hard and the TV news promised continuing rain for most of the day with a cold front moving in the direction that we wanted to travel: toward the east. We decided to wait until 9:00 AM before leaving to try to drive on the other side of the morning rush hour. Cathy, son Bill, and Stacey caught some more sleep before the two younger folk left for work. We left in a hard rain at 9:00 AM. We had decided to try to go through Atlanta and then southeast on I75, but we got into some impossibly heavy traffic while we were still far north of the city. We headed east on a back road and relied on Cathy and Sally the Navigator to get us over to I85 far enough northeast of Atlanta to give us lighter traffic. Although the rain continued, we succeeded in finding our way to I85 and were on the way to Beaufort, South Carolina and the Low Country. We ate lunch in a Cracker Barrel and picked up a CD book near Greenville, SC. When we reached I95, we got hammered by a series of three powerful cloudbursts. We toughed it out and made our way to our Hampton Inn by 5:00 PM. We were situated at the edge of a beautiful salt marsh that reminded us of home. We unhitched the trailer and drove over to Ollie’s Restaurant on Lady’s Island. As usual, we were looking for another restaurant, but we liked Ollie’s anyway. We did some shopping in a Bi-Lo supermarket on the way back to the room.

Tuesday morning was sunny, but cool and breezy. We decided to spend the day in Savannah, so we drove there and parked at the Visitors Center. We saw an interesting film about Savannah and picked up a map. We moved the car to a parking garage in the historic district and headed on foot for the river. We walked for a while and ate a great lunch at The Shrimp Factory restaurant along River Street. After lunch, Cathy wanted to visit the Telfair Museum of Art. Bill felt like he had been teleported into the movie, “Groundhog Day”, because he remembered a less than wonderful visit to the same museum in 2001 (see Happy Holidays 2001, Sunday, December 30). This time, the featured artist was Ray Ellis who visited and painted in many of the areas that we have also visited and enjoyed, including our home base of Cape May. We both enjoyed the paintings and also visited his gallery nearby where we bought a book and some note cards featuring his work. Afterward we walked around the city some more, thoroughly enjoying our return to Savannah. We drove to Port Royal and ate dinner at the Dockside Restaurant, which we had also visited in 2001. We watched a nice sunset after dinner and then drove to the Port Royal boardwalk, which is totally non-commercial and runs for a few hundred yards along the edge of the salt marsh.

Wednesday was moving day. We got an early start and arrived in the check-in queue at Hunting Island State Park at 8:20 AM. We were assigned a spacious site about 50 yards from the ocean. The temperature stayed in the upper 60s and low 70s even though the sun was out because of a strong northeast wind that blew all day. Our campsite was so spacious that we had a hard time backing in because we had to decide where the camper should be. Normally, that isn’t an issue. We noticed that the clientele in this state park campground were somewhat different from what we had been used to. There were many small tents and several popup campers and very few large rigs. We weren’t sure if the price of a campsite was a factor in the difference. We got settled and drove the XTerra to Beaufort for a walk around the waterfront and some coffee at a local coffeehouse. On the way back to the campground we did some shopping in a Publix supermarket on St. Helena Island. We ate lunch in the camper. Cathy decided to have a quiet afternoon in the camper away from the wind. Bill decided to fish at the fishing pier at the south end of Hunting Island and later in the surf near our campsite. The result was the same in both places: nada. We took a short walk on a boardwalk nature trail and then went to dinner at Johnson Creek Tavern. The fresh seafood dinner was wonderful. Out the window we could see the whitecaps of the inlet between Hunting Island and Edisto Island to the north. We went to the south end of the island to enjoy the sunset over the water and then returned to the camper for the evening.

On Thursday, we traveled to the other end of Low Country: Charleston. This again was a revisit; we had spent some time in Charleston in 2000 (see Happy Holidays 2000, Friday, December 29). This time, we entered the city in the midst of a power outage which affected a good bit of the historic district. We parked in a garage and started to walk around, looking for a restaurant for lunch. We settled on Magnolia’s Uptown Down South Restaurant where we enjoyed a most excellent lunch. We circumambulated the historic district, enjoying the flowers, the warm weather, and the grand houses. We stopped at the Port City Java Café for a frappechino and a rest during the walk. We left just before lunch hour and drove to a laundromat next door to the Hampton Inn where we had stayed. Bill walked about a mile to the Bi-Lo store to buy a few items while Cathy did the clothes. Afterward, we drove to Ollie’s Restaurant for a second meal there after failing to find an appropriate restaurant in Beaufort. We tried the shrimp burger and found it interesting and fairly good.

Friday was a day for us to spend most of our time on Hunting Island. We started with a kayak trip on the island’s lagoon. This was a pleasant paddle, protected from the pesky east wind. We saw the wildlife typical for a salt marsh. We were in a tandem, sit inside kayak, which bothered Cathy a bit, but the kayak proved to be stable enough to give us an uneventful trip. We ate lunch in the camper. After lunch, we went for a nice walk on the beach. It was good to walk barefoot on the warm sand with the waves crashing nearby. After cleaning up, we headed into Beaufort and the Common Ground coffee shop. As Bill enjoyed a latte on the back porch, he decided to see if there was an available wireless network. Sure enough, the Beaufort Marina had a network that could be used for $4 per day. Bill signed up and processed email, including 220 spam messages and 4 real ones. On the way back to the campground, we stopped at a Winn-Dixie for some supplies. We cooked red beans and rice accompanied by a Caesar salad for dinner. When was the last time that we ate all three meals in the camper? Maybe an astute reader can figure that one out. After dinner, the rain started. We immediately discovered that Bill’s waterproofing didn’t work very well.

Saturday morning came early with torrential rain and thunderstorms. NOAA predicted more of the same for the entire weekend and into Monday. We decided to bail out of the campground and head home in the rain. We had to work around thundershowers as we went about the morning chores and packing up. Bill wore a rain suit and Gortex boots, but got soaking wet anyway. We finally got on the road a bit after 10:00 AM. Many others in the campground also decided not to stay for the weekend, but there were still several tents when we left. Cathy accused Bill of being a fair weather camper, but would she have enjoyed the rainy weekend in the camper? We’ll never know. We had dry driving for a few hours after getting on I95 and stopped for lunch at the same Cracker Barrel in Florence, SC as on the way down on December 29. After lunch, we had heavy rain all the way to our stopover at a Hampton Inn in Rocky Mount, NC. There were no restaurants nearby, so we ordered a pizza from Pizza Hut for our dinner. We watched the Kentucky Derby as we ate. Cathy has become a horse racing fan since she read “Sea Biscuit”. This was our last night on the road.

We got back on the road by 7:00 AM on Sunday morning. The rain held off for the most part, so we were encouraged to try our “Plan A” route back home. We turned off on US 58 at Emporia, Virginia and headed east. We drove over to the Delmarva Peninsula over a very calm Chesapeake Bay via the Chesapeake Bay Bridge/Tunnel. Traffic remained light until we reached Ocean City, Maryland and then again around Rehoboth Beach. We arrived at the ferry terminal in time for the 1:45 PM ferry and with time to grab some lunch to eat in the car. The toll collector asked for our length and Bill said that we were 34 feet long. The collector said, “No way.” We didn’t understand why he reacted that way until later when we saw that 35 feet was the cutoff for a seven dollar toll increase. Our length is actually 36 feet, but we didn’t know that it made a difference to the toll amount. There was a SW wind blowing, so the bay was a bit rough going across. We enjoyed seeing the bay again after four months absence. We arrived home around 3:00 PM. We popped the camper in order to unpack and dry things out. We got to work trying to get settled back in the house. We did some minimal shopping and picked up a pizza for dinner at Louie’s. The trip was over; life goes on. We had put 16,000 miles on the XTerra and 11,000 miles on the trailer. We traveled through or visited New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Mexico, New Mexico, and Colorado. It was what we wanted it to be: an adventure.

Bill and Cathy