Quack Pack 2

Our plan after leaving Big Mike's was to hang out in northern Florida for a while, catching a rocket launch at the Kennedy Space Center on December 5th before heading down the South Florida parks. We would then take our time heading back north to the two parks we skipped near Atlanta and ending up in Atlanta in time to fly to the Dominican Republic on January 15th. Over the course of Thanksgiving our plans changed and we decided to meet up with Kathleen's family in Austin for Christmas, meaning that we ended up hurrying south faster to have time for those three parks before we needed to move fairly quickly West. On recommendation from our new friend Christopher, whom we met at Big Mike's, we started the week by going to check out the  Hare Krisha Temple in Alachua, which is the biggest in the US. We were also told that they do free lunches everyday. It is a beautiful property and they invite people to come walk around. Because cows are sacred in the Hindu religion they have...

November was an incredibly cheap month, aside from purchasing plane tickets to go see Kathleen's cousin Anna in the Dominican Republic. We didn't drive too much and stayed well under our $10/person/day food budget. Maintenance: We bought a spare tire at Discount Tire. Unfortunately, they did not have the right wheel, so we still need to look for one of those. We also had to replace the car battery and a fuse. Spare Tire: $193.86 Battery and Fuse: $99.62 RV running total: $19,412.54 Service: $83.25 another oil change! We drove over 5,000 miles since Kansas City so we decided to swap oil out again in New Bern, NC. Fuel - We're still keeping up on our  Fuel log . November was a light driving month. This month, we drove 2,443 miles on 200 gallons of gas, averaging 12.2 MPG (a bit lower than previous months) Gas: $479.19 Propane: $9 - We only needed to get propane once this month. Food: $443 - We did a much better job not eating out as much and when eating out, not getting drink...

We spent a few days before Thanksgiving hanging out in Ocala, Fl. We were trying to find a place that we might be able to volunteer with people who were in need or didn't have family during. Unfortunately for us, but not for those we were hoping to serve, every place we called said that they were completely booked up with volunteers and couldn't take us. So, we decided to drive into Ocala National Forest and try to find a place to camp and have our own Thanksgiving celebration. Ocala National Forest has a ton of places to camp and do things throughout the day, but very few of them are free. The only place we could stay for free was the Davenport Landing campsite which only had primitive camping available 2 miles down a dirt road. We ended up staying there for three nights. At the campsite we met two men who were camping there as well, both of whom were very friendly. Ben seemed to be in his mid 30s. He seemed to be using the forest as a way to escape recent troubles in his life...

Even though we don't spend a lot of time in cities, we started this week of with a trip to Charleston, South Carolina. We felt like it had been a long time since Aiden really got to run around and interact with other dogs so we looked up dog parks in the area and found a perfect one downtown. While there we also got a chance to talk to other owners, one of whom recommended walking along the water front nearby. It was a great recommendation, complete with a beautiful park.   Confederate statues seem to be alive and well in Charleston, which as we talked about in our Gettysburg post , is a phenomenon we don't understand. We were planning on taking off and heading south that night but had a very strange noise coming from our back tires as we drove. After getting to a parking lot and having Andreas watch as Kathleen slowly drove around we discovered that the lug nuts were loose on the back passenger wheels. We tightened them by hand and went to a shop in the morning which tightened...

After finishing up in Columbia, SC, we decided it was time to start heading south. It had been below freezing at night for a few nights in a row. We were ready for some t-shirt weather. After a stop in Charleston and Vidalia (see Travel Update 10), we stumbled upon Big Mike's Horse Ranch and RV Park on Allstays. It was listed as a private campground that was free, which was an oddity, but it did have highly positive reviews on Allstays as well as Google. So, we decided to go check it out! Mike is a retired veteran who owns a ranch, with his wife Alice, just outside of Homerville, GA. He keeps all sorts of animals including horses, donkeys, goats and chickens. He decided to open up an RV park in his grazing field. He pays for any upkeep by renting out a few spots with full hookups for $20 / night and has the rest of the field open, for free, to boondockers like us. We got there on Tuesday and liked it so much that we stayed until Saturday!   The horses and donkeys would come graze o...

We started the week by heading down to see more coastline, this time in southern North Carolina. We found some free camping that we wanted to check out in the Croatan National Forest, but wanted to find a reasonably sized population center first to watch the Sounders win the MLS cup. We settled on Morehead city and asked around there for good activities to do in the morning. Fort Macon State Park was recommended to us at the visitor center, and we're really glad we found it. We spent three hours there, but definitely could have spent more time if we had it. We started by doing a really nice walk around the park.    After that we had about an hour to check out the visitor center and the actual fort. They had a video, which is usually one of our favorite things but we didn't get a chance to watch it. Instead we attended a live demonstration of some WWII weapons that they were doing as park of their Veteran's Day weekend. Even though the fort was primarily a civil war fort, it...

Congaree National Park sits in the heart of South Carolina, within 30 minutes of the state's capital. It was protected because it is was one of the last places in the country to have a large hardwood forest on a flood plane. The flood plane, which floods an average of 10 times a year, provides the trees with fresh nutrients from upstream allowing them to grow incredibly tall. The park features 25 "champion trees" - trees that are the tallest of their species in the country. The most interesting of the trees to us was the Bald Cyprus, which features "knees" - roots that grow back up out of the ground. Scientist's best guess as to why they grow these is to provide stability during high wind, but that remains just a guess. Because the park is on a flood plane, water sits around making the perfect spawning ground for mosquitoes. Luckily for us, the temperatures have been close to or below freezing, so we had the "All Clear".   In the park, we went on a...

Our big event this week was Shenandoah National Park , which we absolutely loved. It of course has it's own post. As does our visit to the Wright Brothers National Memorial . Outside of those destinations, the week was a pretty slow one. We spent a total of three nights at a Brayley Pond, a camp ground in the George Washington National Forest in Virginia. It was a great free camp ground that gave us a chance to rest and recharge. We did a short hike around the pond on Wednesday. Other than that, we just took some to hang out and let this kids explore.   Unfortunately it started to get pretty cold, so it was quickly time to move on. From there we continued south to Durham, North Carolina where one of our friends from Eugene is currently living. She kindly invited us out to drinks with her work friends, which was a lot of fun. It's always great interacting with other people. We are also excited to finally be getting into basketball season. On Saturday, the Oregon Women's Bask...

North Carolina license plates proclaim them as "First in Flight." Which seems a little like cheating the first people to fly were boys from New York, living in Ohio, who happened to chose Kitty Hawk, North Carolina as the place for their flight. None the less, we wanted to see the place where that first flight happened. There is now a National Monument at the site of the first flight. It also includes a rail like the one the Wright Brothers used to take off, and other rocks marking how long each flight they took was. Because it was once sand dunes the hill that they flew off of has migrated back about 500 feet. But grass has been planted on the hill so it now stays in place, complete with another monument on it. Inside the visitor center they have a recreation of the first plane (the original is in DC at the Air and Space Museum) as well as lots of information about the state of knowledge at the time when the brothers flew. It was a pretty fascinating museum with some cool in...

Shenandoah National Park gets a lot of visitors every year, in large part due to the fact that it is only 70 miles away from DC and the large population centers around there. This is especially seen in their weekend visitors, since it's a pretty easy weekend trip down. Even though we were there off season, when we arrived on Sunday evening the park was swamped. The main "attraction" in the park is Skyline Drive, a beautiful winding 105 mile road down a ridge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. We had always thought that the Blue Ridge Mountains were a specific mountain range, but it is, in fact, an entire region of Appalachia. Or as wikipedia terms it: a physiographic province. Also - John Denver led us astray, they are predominantly in Virginia, not West Virginia. As is the Shenandoah River. Nicerthannew.com The views down Skyline Drive is stunning and there are tons of look out along the road to take in the sprawling views in either direction. There are over 75 overlooks down...