SCOUTING FOR A CAMPSITE.
Day 12 – The campers with the two loud, barking dogs extended their stay through the weekend. Oh well. As it turned out, we were gone all day, and when we got back to the RV it was almost dark and the campground was full. Full of barking dogs & children running around screaming. Really, I am completely aware this is what camping is all about particularly on a busy weekend. Just doing my own kind of barking, LOL.
This morning Rob walked our campground loop; there are five of them. He took the camera, wanting to check out the boat launch and Trap Pond, both of which are just three campsites from our site. I’d walked to the pond yesterday; kayaking from there will be easy. Looking at campground maps & literature, there is also a small pond which is part of the Park – Trussum Pond. We’d like to check that out also because it’s supposed to be part of a Bald Cypress swamp. We would love to kayak there. Usually you find this kind of opportunity farther south.
We left this morning at around 10 a.m. and drove all around Maryland’s eastern shore and Delaware. Our first objective was to try to find availability for four nights at the State Park closest to Easton, MD. My stepmother lives in Easton. This Park, Martinak State Park, was completely booked for this weekend. If not successful, we would check out the next closest State Park and keep looking this way until finding something with 4 night’s availability. The biggest challenge would be finding a campsite later next week around the weekend.
We drove by Trussum Pond, close to our current campground, and it was indeed a Bald Cypress swamp and assuming we finish campground scouting today, we’ll kayak there tomorrow. Trap Pond is liable to be quite busy, but maybe we’ll kayak there, also.
Arriving at Martinak State Park, we were given a campsite map by the park ranger, and we drove through each campground loop, writing down the numbers of the campsites which we could fit into, that were level enough for the RV, and were private enough (not near restrooms or showers, not by playgrounds, and with decent space between the surrounding sites). Then we circled through again, circling the numbers of our favorite sites of the bunch. We stopped near the campground exit where we could get a signal on the phone & looked at the campground online, checking the availability of our favorite sites for the dates we needed. Finding one of our favorites available, we reserved that site.
Then we drove to the next campground we’d wanted to stay at after Martinak. And we repeated this process until we’d been able to reserve campsites to get us through November 4th. And put us reasonably close to four separate National Wildlife Refuges, two in Maryland and two in Delaware. It’s time for the fall migration of waterfowl from the north to the south.
This process took all day, but we were successful and it felt good to have seen the sites we were reserving beforehand, and to have a place to stay during a busy time. We did a lot of driving, following the GPS at first. This took us on major roads with lots of traffic. We began doing our own navigation instead, and this took us on a more scenic, but much longer journey. The topography was flat except for some small hills on the peninsula down to Elk Neck State Park in upper MD. Lots of farms, but we were surprised at the large number of huge housing developments that have replaced many of the farms. People commuting to the bigger cities I guess.
We stopped at Panera for a quick, mediocre lunch, and for dinner on the way back to the RV, we grabbed sandwiches from Subway; they were much better than Panera. It appeared that, even though we were gone all day, the girls slept all day.
