The first day of the excursion was a leisurely drive up the interstate to a small town in Georgia called Forsyth. Our stop for the night turned out to be a really nice campground in a deeply wooded area with a fantastic view of the interstate highway flowing by. I drove a short distance from the main road into the park and found out right away that this was going to be a pleasant short stay. Rain had been in the forecast and we managed to get camp set up before the steady drizzle got going. I was feeling that this kind of camping wasn’t all that bad, until right before dark, another camper pulled in about six feet from our front door. This was apartment living, RV style.
We managed to get a little bit of exercise before the rain arrived, eyeing the fellow campers and their rigs. I was having flashbacks of me as a teenager, my mom and dad with their 31 foot Airstream trailer and International Travel All truck. It was one of those things that did go right for my dad after he got home from Vietnam. The government gave him something like a dollar for every day he spent in prisoner of war camp. He took that money and bought the RV rig of his dreams. They took us on a long trip with them, and every night they would string up the owl lanterns around their trailer awning, while us kids groaned and tried to look like we did not belong to the Airstream crowd. They would always walk the park, and make friends with the fellow campers, while I was trying to pretend that I was not really an 18 year-old that was camping with his folks. Now, Pam and I were older than they were back then, walking the park, but somehow, I didn’t have the personality to go up to strange people and say ‘Great weather we’re having…if you’re a duck!’. Nope, that wasn’t me, but I did have a plan for the lanterns….
We are using a ‘rig’ that must strike people as quite odd, and I do see many confused looks from fellow campers. Most people either go the route of getting something as big as they can possibly handle or totally minimalist. Usually, people that are pulling an Airstream Bambi are unusual folk. Here we have something quite small and light, yet expensive. One might imagine that it would be pulled by a tricked out Jeep Wrangler or a family SUV. Instead, we are pulling it with Megavan, the Nissan van we bought for doing farmer’s markets, and the van is actually larger than the trailer. It is also possible that the strange looks are because the van is nice and shiny and the trailer has way too many dents in it for something that cost so much.
We are excited and sleep will be hard to come by. The next day we will meet the Ollie, the pandemic puppy, and his family in Powder Springs, Georgia. Or we will get conked on the head by robbers, if you can believe my brothers. I am in that in between place, where I am hopeful that there really is a dog, and maybe it likes me or if it looks like a robbery, I can get out of there fast. Yes, sleep was looking like an elusive creature this time. Tomorrow will be driving through Atlanta pulling a trailer, and then going out into a country suburb and meeting whatever awaited us there. The plan was to drive from there to the mountains and camp a few more days…with an 8 week old puppy…what were we thinking?
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