Camping and Other Stuff

We slept in a little bit once again and we ended up leaving the hotel sometime between 10:30 and 11.  We had no real final destination in mind for the day, we only knew that we would be camping tonight.  Chris did have two things on the agenda, one involved geocaching and the other was, to put it nicely, a freakshow. 

We drove north from the hotel only for about a half hour or so for our first stop which was for breakfast.  We ended up getting bagels at a place called Einstein Bagels which is a chain.  We are not sure if it is just in the Atlanta area or if they are more widespread, but we hadn’t seen them before yesterday.  We alo bought gas ($3.61/gallon) and we took this very disturbing picture:

When we picked up this vehicle we knew it was going to be pricey when it came to gas.  The worst part was that $100 didn’t fill the tank.  It automatically shut off at $100.  It was just about full but it might have been able to take another gallon or so.

The next stop was for a geocache.  Chris wants to find a geocache that was hidden in each month since the start of geocaching (May 2000).  We have 3 months to go.  We need to find a cache hidden in July, August, and September of 2000.  Turns out in Georgia, right on our way, are caches found in two of these months.  Lake Lanier (Lake Sidney Lanier officially), is a large reservoir 50 or so miles north of Atlanta.  The lake is quite large, about 59 square miles.  It is a very popular place for Atlantans (is that a word?) to get away for the weekend or the week.  From what we could tell, boating and fishing seem to be the most popular activities around the lake.  One of the caches is on an island in the lake and requires the use of a boat.  If you think $100 for gas is a lot of money you should have seen the price for a half a day of renting a boat.  We thought long and hard, Chris really wanted to go for it, but we ended up not going for the island cache.  We will get another shot, there are six other caches in the world that were hidden in July 2000, and 5 of them are in the USA.  Unfortunately the nearest one to home is in Michigan.  The cache we did end up finding did not require a boat.  It was a short hike along a nature trail along the shore of the lake.  This one was hidden in August 2000.  This is even rarer as there are only 3 geocaches on earth that were hidden in August 2000.  We parked the car, and even though it was still morning, it was quite hot.  From the parking lot the GPS said the cache was a quarter mile away but it took us almost a half hour to get to it as the trail meandered back and forth.  We found the cache, which was hidden in a fake rock, as to not be accidentally discovered by non-geocachers.  We then explored the shores of the lake a bit more before heading back to the car.

We then started driving north from there, with a second destination, which was to put it nicely, a freakshow.  The highway we were on eventually turned from an expressway to a state highway with a speed limit of 55 but given that it was quite rural, we were easily able to do 65-70.  Eventually it turned into a slower paced, narrower road cutting through hilly farmland and woods and 45 was about as fast as we could go.  We had no intention of drinking so early in the day but we saw signs for several wineries.  We decided to go to the first one we hit, but we would only go to one.  After seeing the first sign for the wineries (with no mileage indicated on the signs), we hit the Blackstock vineyards and winery.  It was probably 15 miles out of our way, at least we thought.  We were the only people at the winery, which is located in the foothills of the northern Georgia mountains.  The guy working there said that they were the largest grape grower in Georgia, but now that we have internet we are seeing that his statement may not be true.  The tastings were expensive, much more expensive than last week’s wine tasting, which had been free.  We paid $10 for one round of tastings.  They let you try 8 different wines, out of maybe a dozen or so.  We only got one tasting, given the high price.  Most of the wines were too dry for our taste but we did like one particular variety, which we ended up buying two bottles of.  We snapped a few pictures of the vineyards with the mountains in the background, then we were on our way.

The next stop had been scheduled.  We thought that the winery had put us 15 or more miles out of the way, but as it turns out, all of those backroads ended up being a short cut to where we were headed next.  The next stop was arguably the strangest place we have ever been to.  It was also the creepiest.  We went to the Babyland General Hospital which Chris had spotted a few weeks back while looking at the Delorme map of Georgia.  What’s Babyland General Hospital you ask?  Look it up.  You too will not believe your eyes when you read the details of this place.  To sum it up, Babyland is where Cabbage Patch Kids are born.  The staff is all dressed up as doctors and nurses.  Most of the visitors we saw were very much unlike us.  They were unlike us in that they all brought their Cabbage Patch Kids with them.  We didn’t have ours with us for one of three reasons:  Either we never had a Cabbage Patch Kid in the first place (Chris); Our Cabbage Patch Kid was either lost or thrown away sometime in 1985 or 1986 (Jackie); or even if we still had a Cabbage Patch Kid we don’t take them with us on vacation.  The people who we saw there all had their Cabbage Patch Kids with them.  In fact, they even carried them around like they were real babies.  Creepy.  We looked around but ended up leaving pretty quickly before someone talked to us.  We will say it again.  Google this place.  See what Wikipedia has to say.  All we can say is, wow.

After leaving Babyland we started to think about where we were going to end up for the night.  We knew we were going to be camping and we didn’t want to arrive at our campsite too late because we wanted time to enjoy ourselves before it got dark.  Before figuring out where we were headed we stopped at a Walmart to buy two cheap billows ($2.50 each) plus a towel ($3?).  We also bought some burgers to cook for dinner along with some other stuff.  Chris had downloaded a campground app about a year ago.  Best $2.50 we ever spent.  We found what seemed like a nice campground about 50 miles away on a lake which straddles the Georgia/North Carolina border.  What made this nice was that it was primarily for tenting only, which meant there would be no RVs.  We have nothing against RVs but we have found that campgrounds that cater to RV’ers are generally more commercialized and the tent sites are usually in not so nice locations of the campground, like in the middle of a field with no privacy and lots of sun, or they are clustered together, again offering no privacy.  Being primarily for drive up tenters we knew that there would be lots of privacy, the sites would generally be nicer, the campground would be quieter, and it would likely be cheaper since you aren’t paying for things like a pool, a video game room, electricity hook ups and internet service.  When we arrived at the campground on Chatuge Lake, we had the place to ourselves.  According to the campground app, the campground had opened for the season on May 1^st.  Today just happened to be May 1^st.  Of 100 sites, we counted only 4 occupied including ours.  This was good.  We were able to choose pretty much any site we wanted, so we chose one right on the lake.  Being that it was still early in the season the bugs were pretty much non-existent.  Another perk of coming this early in the season is that there was firewood everywhere.  The woods had not been stripped of every single piece of dead piece of wood.  Normally at a campground this size you either have to drive your car a mile or two outside the campground to get firewood off the ground or you have to buy it.  We didn’t have to do either today.  The other great thing about this campground was that it was very inexpensive. Since the campground was a National Park Service campground our National Parks pass allowed us to stay for half the price.  We paid $7.50 for the night instead of $15.  We probably could have stayed for free since the fee collection was honor system based but we didn’t want to chance it.  You never know when a ranger is going to come by and check for your permit.  So we ended up paying less for our nights’ stay than we did for our wine tasting.  We were also very lucky that it was so early and the season and so few people there that the showers and bathrooms were the cleanest we have ever seen.  We quickly set up the tent and started cooking dinner.  We were greeted by two very tame ducks, a male and female.  The female was very brave.  She ate bread right out of Jackie’s hands.  The male duck was a little less brave but he still would come within 2 feet or so of us to eat.  These animals would not go away.  Finally when two other ducks approached they became defensive and instead of trying to get our food they were more concerned with not letting the other ducks get our food, so they left us alone for a while.

After dinner we stayed up next to the fire for several hours.  It didn’t get really dark to the point where you needed a flashlight until about 10 PM.  We probably stayed up another half hour after that, drinking some coronas and sitting around our fire under the moonlight.  We finally hit the bed and it probably took us another several hours to get to sleep.  There was some kind of annoying bird that would not shut up all night.  We have no idea what it was but all we could remember was that we would remember its call for the rest of our lives.  At one point Jackie asked if I had a gun in the truck, which I did not.  And with that constant chirping of the same melody over and over again all night long, that we thought would be burned in our minds forever, now, as we write this, we cannot remember what it sounded like.  Jackie thinks she fell asleep for good at 5 AM.  Needless to say, we slept in again.