Almost There....

We are now in Adel, GA at Reed Bingham State Park. This has kind of turned into our annual tradition - drive 2 full days, then pull over for a day or so at Reed Bingham. We left Columbus Friday morning and had a nice, uneventful drive down to just south of Knoxville, TN, where we stayed overnight at a somewhat scary Walmart. On Saturday we drove through Atlanta and once again had a pretty easy drive down here to Adel. We were pretty pleased with the road conditions on Saturday, because last year we had the exact same schedule and ran into absolutely horrible traffic starting with just south of Atlanta - stop and go for the next 100 miles - it was awful. I was kind of afraid that this is just what you get when you travel south on the Thanksgiving weekend. But thankfully I was wrong - the traffic was fairly heavy, but moved smoothly with no delays at all. Whew!

After two days of non-stop traveling we're always ready for a little break, and this park is perfect for that. The park is about 10 miles off I-75, and about 40 miles north of the Florida state line. So tomorrow we'll get up at a decent time and hit the road - we hope to make it down to the Sarasota/Bradenton area by late tomorrow afternoon and will probably pull over into the Walmart overnight; then on Tuesday we'll do the last 100 miles or so to get to Fort Myers fairly early in the afternoon. I'm dreading it a little, because it sounds like it's going to rain pretty much all day and I really do NOT like traveling in the rain. But the good news is if it gets too bad we'll just pull over - no big deal. One of the things that's so nice about having such a long time frame for the trip is we can afford to sit out a day or two whenever we want to - totally unlike the poor folk who have to rush down, spend a few days, and rush back home all in the space of a week. Honestly, we can't even IMAGINE!

So our day here has been great - sunny all day, high in the mid-70's. I love the trails here so did a little jog this morning and then took Brandi out on the trails for probably two hours. It was great to be out walking with just a T-shirt and shorts. Another thing that's kind of unique about this park is it actually has cable at each site, so Dave took a nice long bike ride earlier and then got to catch a couple of Sunday football games.

We took a little ride into town - and I DO use that term loosely - for a few groceries. Once again, we are always kind of shocked at some of the poverty in these small southern towns. One of the kind of weird things we do sometimes is look at the food in the grocery stores and try to figure out how the "locals" eat - I know, kind of a strange thing to do, huh? Anyway, we were amazed on some of the "pork" things in the meat case - like pig STOMACH, pig FEET, pig EARS, something called "pork trimmings" which looks like a big thick strip of fat about an inch thick, six inches wide and a couple feet long, and lots of other bizarre-looking things - REALLY icky looking! What DO these people DO with this stuff? Ugh!

On our way back to the park, we pulled over to look at one of the cotton fields - it always seems so strange to us to drive by these huge fields that look like they have Johnson & Johnson cotton balls laying all over them. The field we looked at had already been picked (harvested?) and the cotton was mushed into these huge bales. I'm attaching a picture with me standing in front of it for perspective. When you walk up to it, it looks like a jillion, trillion cotton balls all mashed together.

Anyway, we LOVE being back south again and look forward to crossing into Florida tomorrow. My next post should be from Koreshan State Park on the south side of Fort Myers. This park is pretty interesting (it's the site of an old "religious" colony), so on my next post I'll have some pictures and little of the history.

PS-per a suggestion from my daughter, I am going to TRY to put in a Google map of each spot we stay at. Wish me luck-this REALLY challenges my technical abilities!

View Adel, GA in a larger map