2nd May – 6th May 2023
Some of our travelling is going places. Some of our travelling is visiting places of note and repute. But sometimes our travelling is killing time and finding somewhere to stop and just exist whilst a bit of time passes. This was the situation for the next four days. We had a booking for Savannah on the next weekend, a long held bucket list destination for us and an experience that we were going to be sharing with our good friends from Conneticut, Greg & Gigi, who were flying in to see us.
Our pitstop was ‘Walkabout Camp’, an RV park with an Australian flavour by virtue of the husband of the couple that owned it being from Melbourne originally. Apart from its name, some shade sails around the pool area and the bathrooms being labelled ‘Blokes’ and ‘Sheilas’, it didn’t feel particularly Australian. It did deliver on the requirements for a good pitstop however:
- Good bathrooms, laundry and wifi. Non negotiable.
- Somewhere to walk – there was a nice maintained trail that meandered through the wooded land next to the park. It was only about a mile long but very pretty. No-one else seemed to either know about it or be interested in walking it so we had it to ourselves.
- A nice pool area – this was also barely used by the other inhabitants, so practically a private pool as well for the Hampsons. Nice.
- Somewhere to bike – The local town, Kingsland, was about 3 miles away and a safe and easy cycle. It was a town of two halves. The new part was close to the highway, was busy with lots of traffic, new construction, tons of eateries, businesses, petrol stations supermarkets and acted like a massive service centre for the highway. We didn’t go there. Instead we cruised into the ‘historic district’. This was very different with almost no business or eateries, dilapidated old homes, abandoned buildings and much quieter.
- A quirky place to eat – the purpose of our journey a’bike to Kingsland was to have brunch at ‘Steffen’s Diner’, pretty much the only restaurant in town. It’s been run by the same family since 1948 and serving up Southern delights and classics continually since then. I had ‘The Benedict’ which was ham and poached eggs on muffins smothered with sausage gravy in lieu of hollandaise sauce. Perfection! We realised why this part of town was so quiet. Pretty much everyone had congregated here. It had been a good idea to come for brunch rather than lunch as there was quite a queue by the time we left.
- A petting zoo – I’m not sure why there was a collection of (mostly pint-sized) animals here, but they added a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ to the ambience of the park. The early morning dawn chorus was the bleating of goats rather than birdsong and the flock of about ten chickens free-ranged amongst the rvs and trucks, having no respect for personal space and dashing towards the rustle of any packet of crisps or crackers at drink’o’clock. There was a depressed looking miniture pony called ‘Hulk’, an equally depressed looking miniture cow called ‘Brutus’, a couple of piggies who did nothing but sleep (so maybe also had low moods) and four goats who looked quite happy. There was also a whole bunch of squirrels to offer us entertainment and amusement. It’s difficult to ascertain the mood of a squirrel but I think that they all generally feel quite upbeat due to their very cool ability to climb trees and perform death defying leaps between branches.
So that was that. A few days of chilling out and then we were back on the (short) road to Savannah.