Cherokee Sage Woman

This review will go on our website; www.gourmetcampers.com.. but here's a preview for my blogging pals.
~~~~~~~~


How Dan Found Religion.. or The story of going to hell (& back!)

A review of Little Manatee River State Park



First off I should say that this campground came highly recommended to me by a little Mennonite nurse that I used to work with. I no longer work there, & it’s not nice to go kick the butts of nice little ladies.. even for such terrible recommendations, so I won’t.



The misnomer of this state park still eludes me.. ‘Little’ (meaning there is ‘little’ to NO chance you will ever see this river unless you get in your car & drive to it.) ‘Manatee’.. which names the county, I suppose. And ‘River’, which we did eventually find. But by that time we were in such a state of dehydration, all we could manage to do was lift the camera & shoot a picture. Forget the fishing or canoeing that we had so looked forward to. When you are excreting 20# of sweat per hour, one only has the strength to inhale & exhale. (And you can skip part 2 of that one, if you have to)



When we arrived at Little Manatee River State Park (hereby called LMRSP from this point because it’s not worthy of my typing time).. a tremendous thunderstorm had just passed through. Checking in; the portend of things to come.. ‘Sorry folks, the electricity is out, I’ll have to do all this by hand’. Granted, we tent camp.. so we don’t have all the gee-gaws of an RV or pop-up tent.. but we do have the bed to blow up, and lights that need the ‘joy-juice’. So we sucked it up a little & drove to our 2 ‘adjoining’ sites. The roads leading there had not been graded in this decade & had potholes which we could have circled in for a couple of days, had Dan not had a sense of direction equal to a GPS.

And so we found the ‘adjoining’ sites, separated only by a 15’solid wall of palmetto/oak/pine/citrus plants. That’s right, we now had condo’s.. one for the kitchen/dining/living rm; the other for the bedroom/trailer storage. Now ask me how many times the car keys were.. oops! Over on the bedroom side.. & the flashlight was.. drat! Over on the kitchen side. And between the 2, you danced over the 2’ radius of a fire ant bed. It keeps you on your toes, & you learn conservation of movement over the next 48 hrs.



This experience is definitely a Good News/Bad News tale. The good news was; We had a new piece of furniture in the kitchen! New shelving & tabletop, granting lots more prep space & waterproof storage area. Great buy from Sportsman’s Guide! (Go to Great Gear, click on Camp Kitchen.. & see for yourself) And on the screen room dining area, we had new ‘Parrot’ lights from iParty.. nice soft glow that added fun to the campsite.

*But I have to be honest, we could’ve had 10 prancing ponies & Bozo the clown & still not have been able to give much ‘fun’ to this campsite. We also had a new oven; Brinkman with 2 cooking levels.. wahoo!

The bad news was; All the rest.



The rains had stopped by the time we arrived, leaving us with short rapid gasps of 100% humidified air. That breathing scenario never changed.. rain or shine. I felt as though we could chew the air up & spit it out.. just that thick. Some years ago I went to Jamaica & felt as though I was wearing a wet towel around my head the entire time. Believe me, that place was as arid as Arizona in comparison to LMRSP. About 15 minutes into setting up camp, Dan began his religious conversion. It started out with a simple, ‘Dear Lord..’ and quickly escalated to ‘Oh my God’ & ‘Sweet Jesus, help me..’ This was not sacra-religious.. they were true prayers from someone who feared dying of heat stroke at any given moment.



It took us until 8:30 to set up the 2 campsites. We were both dripping in sweat. There were no dry areas on our bodies.. & the mosquitoes were discovering the joys of human sodium deposits. Along with their not-so-distant cousins, the dreaded no-see-ums. And so we began the shower brigade which would be repeated not less than a dozen times in a 2 day span. *(I have to interject, in my complaining travelogue here, that their bathrooms were very nice. Clean, & empty.. secondary to every other camper having the good sense not to be there in mid-August. There was a washer & dryer & coke machine as well)

However, exiting from the shower, we would immediately break into a flop sweat & need the whole process all over again.

At 9:30 Dan suggests starting dinner. I look at him through a sweaty haze & inform him that I don’t have the strength to masticate..’ let’s just go to bed’. We did pull our chairs into the dining/screen room & sat up for awhile, assuring each other that someday we would be laughing about all this, & agreed unanimously that this would happen by 2020. (and you & I both know this is simply a target date)



Taking flashlight in hand, we retired (gingerly over the fire ants) to the next condo. I am at a loss for expression when I try to describe to you the feeling of absolutely NO AIR MOVEMENT! There simply are no words. One must just experience that feeling of having the ever-loving life sucked out of you. All tent windows open, no clothes, no linens over you.. & still you feel the breath of Dante’s Inferno about you. I asked Dan when he thought our bleached bones would be found, if we expired of heatstroke that very night.

‘Love you too.. g’nite’.



0700- weird perception.. We can breathe without effort. Praise be! The coolness has arrived.

0715- False alarm.. that was just the new day’s arriving on gossamer wings. Now comes the gut-wrenching heat.



But then thank goodness, the mosquitoes had died down, so now we could anticipate.. the horde of flies! I had never seen the entire tops of the pop-up tents covered with flies. Yet another sentence I can never repeat. I had to wave paper plates around Dan, so that he could cook breakfast without adding fly-protein to the mixture. He did create a lovely breakfast of Potatoes O’Brien, bacon, biscuits, & scrambled eggs.

And I noted a wonderful insect called the ‘Assassin Bug’, which picks off flies one at a time & gobbles them down. Now I’m usually one to squirm at Mother Natures food chain; the seeming unfairness of it all. HA! I was pulling for Assassin, like he was in the home stretch of the Kentucky Derby. Folks, dehydration does that to you.. be forewarned.



With tummies full and clothing saturated, it suddenly made good sense to walk around the campgrounds. *See above signs & symptoms of dehydration.

On our walk we noted that we were the only tent campers. Such wienies in RV’s & pop up tents (the other 3 brave souls). Yes, we were emerald-green with envy.

We walked (staggered) around the periphery.. to the Youth Camp area & amphitheater area.. Past a gopher turtle, which quickly gave us the right-of-way, doing a 180 to avoid us. But Wild-Kingdom-Dan harassed him for a photo shoot. Paparazzi!

After 3 long days (ok, 1 hr?) we found a bit of the river. It was covered in duck-weed, so that hardly counts. We saw some lovely tigertail swallow butterflies. They resisted the photo shoot. Divas..



Returning back to our campsite.. we were once again thrown into the Near Death Experience of the ‘hades-humidity’. Folks, we were perspiring out of places that just don’t sweat.. but they do & they did.

We watched a mama mud-dauber dig a hole & lay her eggs in this hole, then cover it against predators. Yes, we are mature adults, and yes this process took a couple of hrs. I’m telling you, it was the HEAT!

So, on the pretense of ‘going after more ice’ & secretly knowing that we just yearned for the a/c of the truck, we decided to drive to Sun City. 5 miles up the road, to that wondrous Dorian Gray town where everyone drives a golf cart (probably due to drivers license being revoked for drunk driving.. but whatever. Who am I to judge.. I was in the a/c truck & I felt magnanimous.) We watched one lady nearly tip her golf cart over, riding up on a curb. I was ready to simply sit & people-watch, but we had a mission. We were looking for a fan!

That’s right.. why had we never considered such a thing before? A miracle of invention.. the fan. And when we brought it to camp, we proceeded to sit in it’s glorious presence for the rest of our sentence.. excuse me, camping time. We dragged it from kitchen to dining room to living room. That novelty lasted about 2 hrs. Then we knew the heat was closing in again, so we might as well do as our neighbors to the South do.. take a Siesta. Forced sleep to avoid the mid day/mid nite/ mid life, sun. We did this for 3 ½ hrs. I told Dan that if we had the strength, we would pack up & go home. Even given the fact that this trip had already cost us $250, I was willing to count it as loss, to be able to breathe again. But alas, the spirit was willing, but our flesh was near death.



Dinner that night was excellent (mainly because I sat in the screen room with the aforementioned fan, while my hardworking husband *& my nomination for camper-of-the-year, cooked dinner while dancing the ‘Ow! Mosquito-got-me!’ tango.)

We had grilled chicken marinated in Mrs Dash (this is new) Herbal Garlic sauce. Corn on the cob, and Zatarain’s Caribbean Rice (wow! Gotta try this!)



Several showers later, we were off to bed. But with the blessed addition of ‘the fan’. It is now my favorite camping piece of all time. We slept like babies, except for the lightning storm going on around us. No rain, just death-bolts from the blue.



0700- hey, it feels pretty good out there.

0715- what made us think this day would be any different?

Packing up, without benefit of the fan.. again, there are no words. It’s like a bad, bad dream.. & I don’t want to go there.

In fact, if you ask me to go to LMRSP, that’s what I will say.. ‘I don’t want to go there..’



The End