Woodring Branch, Carters Lake, Georgia - Observations

Camped in the Georgia foothills next to a beautiful, serene lake that stretches for miles in either direction, we found ourselves still sitting in our little camping trailer with the air conditioning on at 7:00 pm in the evening. It was still 93 degrees outside, and the humidity was beyond even my level of endurance. I was raised in South Florida long before air-conditioning was installed in the public schools. No rank amateur am I when it comes to humidity. This vacation, however, was supposed to be a break from the heat and humidity at home. Nope, today it is ten degrees cooler in Florida than here!

Getting up here from Florida was an adventure in itself, watching the temperatures in Atlanta hit 103 degrees, and again few miles further north in nearby Marietta when a local bank thermometer pegged at 104 degrees! The heat had enveloped all of the South, including our picturesque campsite only 50 miles further north. So, instead of kayaking the many coves of Carters Lake or bicycling the hilly campsite after getting settled in, we sat and relaxed and and collected our many thoughts about our first long-distance towing adventure.

Our first observation is never trust the voice commands on the GPS! The programmers who set up the instructions for turning obviously make the assumption that every straight-through instruction means stay in the left lane. The “Bear Left!” command, meant to take you straight through a cloverleaf, will unfortunately often take you up a flyover that really starts to the left but eventually swings back to the right and causes you to exit the route the GPS is trying to tell you to stay on! Always have a map handy and know where you are going before barreling into a spaghetti-bowl interchange that will confuse the GPS so badly you may as well be driving on the moon.

Corp of Engineers Woodring Branch Campground, Carter Lake, Georgia

Secondly, the people who set up the Murphy Gas stations found at many Wal-Marts, must not drive cars. At least, not real ones. Besides the almost mandatory traffic jams because flow-design is non-existent, the last place you want to tow even a small, agile trailer is through the short, angular pump aprons at Murphy's. Even if you do get three cents a gallon off the posted price by using a Wal-Mart credit card, the aggravation of using Murphy gas simply isn't worth wondering if you are going to lose a corner of your precious, but fragile, RV.

Thirdly, have alternatives for everything! Alternative routes for travel as well as alternative activities for being confined to your camper when it is either blisteringly hot or pouring rain. Have alternative meals or food available, and pretend you can't communicate with anyone, because, often, you can't. If you don't have electric power, and you don't have a generator, make sure you have a way to recharge or replace a dead battery! 

Next; George Carlin and the Perseids - musings while at Woodring Campground at

http://sleepstwo.blogspot.com/2010/09/george-carlin-and-perseids.html







 

The Interstate: On to Carters Lake

Never again will I tow a travel-trailer through Atlanta on I-75, no matter what time of day or night, or day of the week. From drivers using their left arms to hold their door shut on their old, banged up pickup trucks erratically towing dilapidated flat-bed trailers, to the eighteen-wheelers racing speeding Lexus's or BMW's, make the experience unnerving. The truckers seemed to take a break from the mundane delight of hounding poor, terrified drivers in the slow lane and attempted to show the unencumbered urban speeders that they can drive just as fast as any nimble sporty car. Just because they were towing a 53-foot long swaying, often ill-tracking trailer, Interstate racing through downtown Atlanta was a challenge many truckers just couldn't seem to resist.

If you don’t know what urban terror is, try driving in the right lane of the twisty, narrow multi-lane Interstate through the urban canyons with two kayaks strapped on top of your SUV, two bicycles on a tail-gate rack and towing a camping trailer in close-packed traffic moving at 65 miles an hour, and watch drivers fly down the entrance ramps without the slightest concern for merging into traffic. They stare straight ahead and simply try to drive into the passenger door of your car! I have ABS brakes on my tow vehicle so I never locked up the Jimmy’s brakes, but I’m sure I flat-spotted the tires on the trailer during the several panic stops I had to make to avoid collisions from traffic merging from entrance ramps. I was glad I had installed both trailer load-equalizers and an anti-sway bar before the trip.

When we finally pulled off of I-75 onto the two lane highway that would take us up into the Georgia mountains to our camp ground, we both sighed audibly with relief. As we finally let our shoulders regain their natural shape and unclenched our fists, both our dogs finally collapsed in the back seat as if to say, “now we can relax, too!”

What makes it all worthwhile happened twelve hours later, after I washed the day-glow pink paint ball splat off the driver's side of the camping trailer. We saw a full grown black bear swimming near the shore in Carter Lake, not 500 yards from our camp site. We were camping at the Woodring Branch Campground at Carter Lake, part of the marvelous U.S. Army Corps of Engineering recreational facilities that surround the lake. We were less than 60 miles, yet a complete world, away from downtown Atlanta.

We watched as the bear climbed out of the water across the cove from us, fumbled around the lake bank for a few moments, then quickly disappeared up into the woods.

It takes a full day for me to finally relax, unwind and realize I am in the wonderful, different world of camping. We decided we'll just find a different way to get here! It won't be on the Interstate!

Next: Carters Lake US Army Corps of Engineers Woodring Campground at:

http://sleepstwo.blogspot.com/2010/09/observations-camped-in-georgia_02.html