July 25th, 2007 – August 6th, 2007
Getting there…
Our ride up to St Augustine was great fun for the first part of the day. The road was easy and we had some really beautiful sections. At one point well along in the ride we stopped for a short break at a conservation area, and while waiting to snag the precious bit of shade that was there, we got to talking with two Audubon bird watchers. We had great fun telling them what we were doing, and listening to their stories about bird watching. When questioned, they strongly recommended Anastasia State Park, and told us to ask for John Cheatwood, who is an AmeriCorps volunteer there.
We started getting really hot and tired by the time we reached the outskirts of the city, so we stopped by a farmer’s market that was just closing down. We managed to score some great freshly baked rolls and some kind of really awesome natural root beer at one of the stands. We were beginning to get used to being quite a sensation when we pull up someplace, and this was no different – we had a small lineup of people who wanted to talk to us. One fellow in particular kept talking to us, and finally offered us a place to stay for that night. He was there with his daughter – she looked to be about 12 or 13, and his daughter’s friend. When this guy told his daughter that he had invited us over for the night, she nearly flipped out and actually took her dad aside and had a small tantrum. Needless to say, we weren’t too thrilled about having to spend a night with someone like that, so we weren’t in the slightest bit bothered when he came back shamefacedly and told us the invitation was off.
After a nice, though hot, rest time we took off for the last half hour of our ride. It was all urban riding, as nearly our entire trip has been so far – so different from last year’s ride across the center of the US! We were incredibly hot by the time we checked in, and that a/c felt soooo good in the office. We asked for John Cheatwood, and met him and Pete Acquaro, another AmeriCorps volunteer. They agreed to meet us at our campsite after they got off work – giving us time to get set up, take a shower, and do laundry.
We loved our site – right next to the bathhouse, but still private, and tucked under the oak trees, with a beautiful shade canopy. We could feel ourselves relaxing immediately, and putting up the tent felt easy and fun.
Off to an exciting start…
After setting up our tent, we headed up to the showers and laundry, and after our recent memorable experiences with the squirrels and birds and raccoons getting into our food, we were extra careful to shut everything up and put everything away before we left our campsite.
We wandered on back to our site, feeling oh so clean and refreshed, just in time to see John arrive on his mountain bike. Before I could even greet him, my eye caught sight of activity on my trailer. I was horrified to see that a squirrel had actually ripped open my Burley trailer cover and was busy chomping away on something! Remember that wonderful Snickers bar from Jim and Laurie? I hadn’t finished mine, so I wrapped it up in its own wrapper, then in two (count ‘em, two) extra thick paper towels, folded over several times, put that whole thing in an extra strength ziplock bag, and finally tucked the whole package away in one of my Eagle Creek pack-it cubes – a canvas and strong netting zipper cube. That little bugger of a squirrel had ripped right through the canvas cover of my trailer, the pack-it cube, a ziplock bag, four layers of thick paper towel, and the candy bar wrapper, in order to get at that Snickers Bar. It looked like a small fountain spurting up out of my trailer. And the final indignity? The damn thing peed on my trailer when I scared it off!
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I now had squirrel pee on my trailer; a 5 inch gash on my trailer cover, with multiple “wounds” running in several directions; a ripped up pack-it cube, and no more Snickers bar. So my trailer now has a nickname – Patch. (Note – it still hasn’t been patched yet – 2 months later, but we have it on the list to do next week. I’m thinking it needs a colorful patch.)
The campground…
Anastasia State Park turned out to be what I’m sure will be one of our most memorable times of our trip. What was only going to be a day or two stay turned into a 12-day stay, and we were still sorry to leave.
What was so wonderful? Just about everything. The campground was so amazing, that even on the first night, I was calling it the Ritz Carleton of campgrounds, and our continuing experiences just reinforced that opinion. For starters, the bathrooms were very clean and that’s always a major plus. The laundry was right next to the bathrooms, so it was easy to get the laundry done, and they had thoughtfully provided a large clothesline with multiple lines in case we wanted to air dry our clothes.
The campsites are tucked up into an oak hammock, and they are amazingly private. The campground is huge – it goes on for acres, with additional camp areas down small private winding lanes. They have a number of events that are held regularly, from learning how to dig for clams, to bird watching, to kayaking, to learning about the local flora and fauna. Island Joe’s is right on the beach, and has a well-stocked camp store alongside a snack bar. The offerings at the snack bar are pretty varied – you can get anything from a variety of breakfast burritos, to a veggie burger or regular hamburger, to boiled peanuts (plain or Cajun style), to fish tacos and ham and cheese sandwiches. The prices are reasonable and the food is great.
The beach itself is huge – it’s wide, clean, and goes on forever in both directions. Concessions for kayaks and bicycles sit by the side of the road coming into camp, and there are a number of playgrounds for children along with picnic and barbecue areas.
Bird watching is extraordinary – we saw great egrets, wood storks, great blue herons, painted buntings (it took us awhile to see these), roseate spoonbills (we finally saw them on our last day there), kingfishers, osprey, pelicans, clapper rails, a wide variety of shore birds, blue jays, owls, and on and on. We were in bird watching nirvana!
It’s possible to go boogie boarding and kayaking, go for long walks on the beach, either walk or ride peacefully around on the campground roads – and we saw no end of joggers and roller bladers.
The people…
We were amazed at how different the campers were here than other campgrounds we’d been at. There seemed to be higher level of education, and a much more polished approach to life. There were many, many more tents than we had seen anywhere else, as opposed to just RVs, and we didn’t see so much of the boom-box/outdoor TV/X-Box gaming systems culture that was so prevalent everywhere else. We even noticed that people weren’t so overweight here! And they were even quieter than other campground campers and kept the bathrooms cleaner…
Jamie…
After the first night here, luxuriating in the strong cell phone and data signal, along with everything else that was so awesome, we went on a bird watching expedition with John Cheatwood. John is an AmeriCorps volunteer who has been assigned to Anastasia State Park for a year. Prior to this assignment, he hiked the Pacific Coast Trail and the Appalachian Trail, taking about 5 months to complete each one. At Anastasia State Park, he showed us the best places to watch for the roseate spoonbills and the painted buntings (both of which are quite rare here), and took us to all the favorite bird hangouts. We saw the toothache tree and ate some of it, licked the salt off the black mangrove leaves, saw some awesomely big banana spiders, dodged stinging nettle, and ate a bit of most of the edible plants in the area. I’m tellin’ ya’ – we definitely didn’t want to leave here just yet!
Chelsea’s friend Jamie, who was supposed to come up to celebrate Chelsea’s birthday, couldn’t make it for several days. That was fine with us, but unfortunately, the campground was completely full for the weekend. We asked John if he had any ideas about what we could do, and we just fell into the dream situation – John was headed out the next afternoon for a week’s vacation, and volunteered his campsite for as long as we needed it. We moved on over the next day, after he had left, and only anticipated staying perhaps 2-3 more days.
Jamie came up on Saturday, along with several other friends, and took us to downtown St. Augustine for dinner and a quick tour. They had driven all the way up from Delray Beach, and had to go back again the same night, so it was a short night, but it was really fun to see a bit of the nightlife, and to see something other than the campsite. And Chelsea loved seeing her buddies.
Our virtual office…
It didn’t take us long to figure out that we could make really good progress on our website contract, in a much more comfortable situation than we had had to date, by staying here and working. We had great signal from the campsite, and we could adjourn to the Island Joe’s pavilion in case of rain. We just packed up everything we needed and cycled the mile or so down there and set up again there. We had a beautiful and private situation at camp, and we got to get out and see people and be near food and be at the beach if we went to Island Joe’s. What’s not to like about that?
John had loaned us his electric fan, and we had use of his lawn chairs, so we could work in comfort (well, relatively speaking…the heat and humidity were pretty noticeable). We spent many, many hours getting caught up – to the exclusion of exercise, bird watching and catching up on blogs and emails. But we made great progress on the website contract!
The bees and ants and raccoons and spiders…
John had his tent up at his site, and he was there for a year, so he had pretty well settled in – he’d been there maybe 8-9 months by the time we met him. Along with him being settled in, a number of banana spiders had settled in. It was definitely different to walk by the entry to his site and look over at this colony of big, little and medium sized spiders, all quietly doing their thing.
We also had those bees that burrow underground, and it was quite a feeling to be sitting and typing away and knowing that my feet were only inches away from their underground homes. I got very used to having those little suckers buzzing steadily around me.
We also had lots and lots and lots of ants. I will probably never forget sitting in 95 degree heat, with 80 percent humidity, with a fan blowing on me to stir the air, typing steadily and intently doing very intense detailed work on the computer, and watching the ants meander their way across my computer screen. There was no way to brush them off, because I’d just have more in another minute, so we learned to coexist. I must admit to being somewhat cross-eyed at times, watching the words as they typed across the screen, watching the cursor as it moved, and trying to differentiate all that from the ants…
The squirrels and birds were pretty calm at John’s campsite –thank heaven, and there were apparently no raccoons. We didn’t have any further incidents, until a night or two before we left. When it got dark each night, we were in the tent, reading with our headlamps, and this night was no different. We hadn’t yet gone to sleep when we heard some rustling noises, so we flashed the light out to see what was up. It’s pretty hard to see any distance with headlamps, so we gave up and crawled outside – didn’t see anything, so we crawled back inside. The noises kept up and all of a sudden all hell broke loose.
From the ungodly screeching and crashing around in the bushes, you would have thought that a mountain lion had caught something and was killing it. We decided that discretion was the better part of valor in this case, so we kept a low profile. The screaming and crashing went on for at least 10 minutes (hard to believe 10 minutes could seem so long), and finally quit. There weren’t any dead bodies in the morning, and we didn’t see any blood. We found out later that it had most likely been a fight among raccoons. Glad that didn’t happen every night!
But sure enough, only one morning later, I heard all the rustlings, indicating that we had raccoons (or something!) back again. It was already light outside, and I sat really still, listening hard, wondering if I should get out and investigate. Suddenly the rustlings were right there, right next to me, and as I stared at the tent flap, in peered a funny little masked face, coming in under our rain fly. I’m not sure which of us was more startled. I smacked the tent door hard, and off he went, as fast as could be.
The camp hosts…
Shortly after we had gotten settled into John’s site, we saw a campground truck pull up – we were clearly about to get a visit from someone. John had told us that he’d let everyone know we’d be there, so there’d be no confusion. One of the women he had told was Mary Held, a student holding down a summer job at the camp. She was very interested in seeing us and hearing our story, and she was a hoot. We got to talking about mosquito repellants and she told us of a friend of hers who sells all natural mosquito repellant. Naturally we were extremely interested, so she agreed to make a call on our behalf and catch up with us the next day.
Meanwhile, we were making friends with the guys who were driving around in their electric carts, cleaning bathrooms and doing whatever else it was that they do. As we discovered, each of the guys was a camp host. They stay in the campground up to four months, and in exchange for their RV site, they commit to working 20 hours a week, doing whatever needs to be done. It might be cleaning bathrooms or cleaning campsites in preparation for new groups, or doing maintenance, or anything necessary.
One night, after only a few days in camp, one of these fellows, Bill, invited us over to his RV. He told us that there would be a party/get-together and were welcome to come and meet everyone. Meanwhile, we ran into Mary over at Island Joe’s, who said she was coming to the party. This was starting to sound like fun. As we continued working steadily on the computer (another one of those 12 hour days), a fellow came by and started chatting with us – turns out that he was a camp host as well, Mike, and had an RV site right next to Bill, so we knew he’d be coming to the party too.
After dropping off our laptop at the campsite, and changing shirts (our version of dressing up) we headed on over to the party. We laughed and talked and listened and ate and drank our way through the next 5 hours. It must have been close to midnight before we finally found our way back to our site, still smiling. After our experience in Key Largo, having to ride in a pitch-black canopy of trees without lights, we were prepared – we had remembered to bring our headlamps, and we had those blinking red lights on our backs. It was seriously awesome riding quietly in the peaceful night, totally alone, watching the moon rise over the dark silhouettes of the trees, and seeing a virtual carpet of brilliant stars against the velvety black sky.
Camp staff…
The camp staff was uniformly wonderful. There was the guy in the camp store at Island Joe’s who let us take books and read them and return them, and who got in touch with the St. Augustine Record trying to get us media attention. There was Tyler Miller, who worked in the snack bar at Island Joe’s who cooked great food, was prompt and friendly in his service, and who is in a band (or three). You can listen to some clips of his music from two of his bands at www.myspace.com/antarcticsounds and www.myspace.com/enmasse1.
The rangers we met at the parties were friendly and funny – I’ll never forget the one who showed up about 10 p.m., still on duty and still needing to clean the big public bathroom (the one with a reputation for being really nasty to clean) and suggesting that we move the party “down the way to the bathroom” and we could “all pitch in and knock it right out”.
We’ve mentioned John Cheatwood and Mary Held, and we can’t forget Pete Acquaro, another Americorps volunteer. We didn’t get to see as much of him, but we did get to hear some of his stories and see some of his photos. Check out his amazing photos at his website www.frontierpics.com.
Getting out of town…
We began to realize that we weren’t going to make our schedule if we didn’t skip some sections, and when we looked at the weather, it showed hot, hot and hotter. We decided to take a bus from St Augustine to Wilmington NC, shipping our bikes on ahead to Wilmington, and stopping off to see Savannah GA, and Charleston SC along the way.
Meanwhile we were still totally in love with Anastasia State Park. We were getting a huge amount done on our contract – enough to give us breathing room, we had a wonderful campsite, we had easy access to a camp store and food concession, and we were surrounded by very friendly and fun people. Showers were easy and laundry was easy. And never mind the fact that John was letting us use his site, so we had no lodging expense.
However, we were getting restless, and we knew John would be back any day. As it turned out, he returned a day or two earlier than we expected, but he was house-sitting for one of the rangers, so that made it easier. However, we did end up sharing his site with him on the last night. We finally took a full day off that last day, other than packing, and went bird watching and beach walking, and all the things that we hadn’t done yet. That last morning was unbelievable – we saw dolphins playing off the coast, close to the shoreline; we checked out some incredible barnacles growing on the pier pilings (we called them the Crustacean Condos – or the Barnacle Bay Condo Association – they had units of all sizes); we watched hundreds of fiddler crabs; and we saw a huge osprey dive into the water only a few feet from us at the shoreline and take off with a freshly-caught fish. Talk about a heavenly morning!
We had a final going away party that last night, so we decided to postpone taking down the bikes ’til the next morning (our bus left at 11:30 a.m.). In retrospect, that was a really bad idea.
I should mention here that Mike, one of the hosts, had taken us into a coffee shop one day, and waited while we did some essential grocery shopping. Later on, he loaned us his little Scion to do errands (we had to hunt down some bike boxes for shipping), and he offered to take us to the bus depot. Both Mike and Bill offered to give us any help we needed in taking down the bikes, so we felt really on top of things. Ah well, ignorance is bliss, for a while anyway.
Packing the bikes…
Taking our bikes apart for that first shipping was a real exercise in stress. We had two bikes and two trailers to fit into 3 bike boxes; we had a horrendous amount of our belongings to fit into something – whether our bike boxes or duffle bags, or whatever; we couldn’t get my bike pedals off for love or money; we didn’t have a pedal wrench; and meanwhile it was really hot and sweaty. 11:30 came and went, and it looked like we might miss the next bus at 2:30 as well. It was already looking bad, as that meant we wouldn’t get into Savannah until late, and we had reservations at a hostel. Things were looking grim.
After running to Wal-Mart and several other places, unsuccessfully, Mike saved the day by taking a regular wrench, running over to the camp’s maintenance shed and grinding it down till it became a pedal wrench. He had to use brute force to get my pedals off. Chelsea and I packed like mad; I ran over to Bill’s RV so we could print out the bus tickets and the shipping orders (we had done our transactions online); and Mike again saved the day by keeping our packed bike boxes at his RV, and dropping them off at a pick-up location after dropping us off at Greyhound.
Meanwhile, Chelsea and I hadn’t eaten a thing, so Mike took me over to a small coffee house, where I got beans and rice to go.
After Mike left us at Greyhound to go bring our bikes to the shipping location, I discovered that I had ordered tickets for the wrong day – I had ordered them for a full week ahead. That meant we were NOT guaranteed space on the bus! We sat slumped in the bus station, surrounded by our boxes and duffel bags, hot, tired, sweaty and hungry, and prayed.