Our February road trip started out with plans to visit Gary and Ellen in Gulf Shores, AL. Then we get invited to Shannon’s birthday party in Wilmington, NC and it becomes a month-long trip. In Part 1 I talk about Ortona South ACE and Manatee Springs SP campgrounds and in Part 2 I talk about Gulf Shores, AL and Gulf Island National Park. In this part I talk about St. George Island SP, North Carolina, Charleston, SC and our trip back to Marathon.

St. George Island State Park

There are two ways we like oysters… raw and cooked. Apalachicola is famous for oysters. Since we are near Apalachicola, we might as well stop there.

The rain at Fort Pickens National Park lets up enough to put everything away, although still wet. We dump black and gray water, fill freshwater to 1/3, attach our toad and leave by 9:40 CT. We stop once for gas and get to St. George Island State Park by 3:30 ET.

Dr. Julian G. Bruce St. George Island State Park is at the eastern side of St. George Island. When we first booked it, there was only one night available. Later,  we booked the second night at a different site. After we decided to go to NC, we booked a third night at another site.

We get to St. George Island State Park. The ranger changes us to a site that is available for two nights. This is a beautiful place, with nice sandy beaches on the Gulf of Mexico. We have a huge site with electric and water. We can walk across to the beach or hike on trails by the sound side of the island.

We need groceries and today is Fat Tuesday. Since we have to go to the store anyway, we decide to make jambalaya on the Coleman stove. The closest store is Piggly Wiggly Express. It’s pretty small and doesn’t have a large selection. We buy some items and go across the street to SGI Fresh Market. This store is no better, but they do have andouille sausage. We go across the bridge to Big Top. They don’t have what we need either.

We go to Lynn’s Quality Oysters to buy oysters and mussels. They only have shucked oysters and no mussels. We drive 13 miles into Apalachicola. They have no oysters but we buy frozen mussels.

We go to Hole in the Wall Seafood for lunch. This place is small, and very busy. We have raw oysters and seafood gumbo. The food is great, the service is just okay and the cleanliness is questionable.

We go back to Piggly Wiggly Express to get the remaining items. This is the best of the three grocery stores in the area.

We drive back to the campground, take a walk on the beach and cook jambalaya.

Today is Valentine’s Day. We move to site 4. Then we go to Lynn’s Quality Oysters for lunch. We have raw oysters. They are delicious. The steamed shrimp is slightly overcooked. the service is great and the people are friendly.

We walk on the trail and the beach. We have salmon with spice rub, grilled on a cedar plank and mussels.

North Carolina

We leave St. George Island after dumping black and gray water, and attaching the toad. We stop at Cracker Barrel in SC for the night.

We have breakfast at Cracker Barrel. We are underway at 8:10, stop at a Flying J for gas and propane, and get to the Wilmington Elks lodge at 1:00 PM. It costs $75 for three nights, with water and electric. Sewer is available on-site.

We go to the laundromat and wash sheets, towels and clothes. We visit the kids and grandkids. We go to Shannon’s birthday party and oyster roast on Saturday and visit on Sunday. On Monday we go to the grocery store, dump the black and gray water and attach the Honda CR-V. We drive to James’s in Ernul.

The next few days we work on the RV. We wash and wax it. We fix the leak in the bathroom vent. We also order a new motor for the steps.  It’s $164 on Amazon.com. The steps have not worked for the past week. We replace the motor and they work.

Charleston, SC

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We drive to the Low Down Oven and Bar for dinner. We have beer, cornbread and pizza. We meet some friendly people, both local and visiting.

The next morning we take the shuttle downtown for $10 per person, round trip. We have breakfast at Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit. Very Good! Then we go or a self-guided tour of the Aiken Rhett House. Very interesting. Next, we stop at The Brick for Bloody Marys.

We walk to the waterfront and have lunch at Fleet Landing. We share shrimp & grits and crab cakes. Great food and service. We even get to watch dolphins playing in the water.

We walk some more and it starts to rain. We go to Low Country Bistro to get out of the rain, and have a couple of beers. The staff is very friendly. We don’t have any food, but I’m sure it is great.

We ride the shuttle back to the campground and pay for another night.

Today we want to see the Angel Oak tree and Folly Beach.

The Angel Oak Tree is on John’s Island. It is the largest tree east of the Mississippi River.

After that we drive to Folly Beach. Our first order of business is to find a place for lunch. After driving around, we find Washout. Food and service are good. The staff is super friendly.

We drive around the island. We go to the county park, where we can park for free with our campground receipt, but it is too cold and windy to enjoy the beach today.

Return to Marathon

Our February road trip is almost over, but we want to make one more stop to clean the RV and get it ready to put back in storage. We book a night at C. B. Smith Park. This is a Broward county park in Pembroke Pines, FL.

This campground is in a good location for us. We arrive in the early afternoon and have a short distance (115 miles) back to Marathon. We can easily time it to not hit Miami peak rush hour traffic. The site is full hook-up, so we have extra time to empty and flush our black and gray water tanks.

The next day we clean the RV, dump the tanks and pack our things to take off the RV. We hook up the Honda CR-V to the towbar and leave the campground at 11:30 to drive to Marathon. We make an expensive mistake.

When we tow the Honda CR-V behind the RV, we use a Patriot Braking System, from Blue Ox. The braking system sits on the CR-V’s floor, in front of the driver’s seat, and attaches to the brake pedal. It senses when the RV is braking and pushes on the brake pedal to brake the tow car. In addition, it has a break-away sensor that will apply the brake if the tow car comes loose from the RV. The braking system in the tow car wirelessly connects to a control panel in the RV. The control panel plus into a 12v, accessory outlet. We don’t have enough 12v accessory outlets for everything. The braking system works without the control panel, so we have not been plugging it in.

We get to the place where we store the RV at 2:15. We get out to unhook the tow car. The braking system says it is break-away mode and it is pressing on the brake pedal. We don’t know how long it has been in break-away mode, but the brake lights have been on long enough to kill the battery.

We jump-start the car and unhook it. The brakes are not good. We have to replace the rear rotors and pads ($424). That will be the last time we tow a car without plugging in the braking system control panel.

In Conclusion

It has been a good trip. We left on January 31 and got home on March 2. We got to spend time with our very good friends, Gary and Ellen and time with some of our family. In the process, we got to explore some areas of Florida, our home state, and Alabama that we hadn’t seen before.

Our February road trip started out with plans to visit Gary and Ellen in Gulf Shores, AL. In February Road Trip – Part 1, I talk about our stops on the way there. In this part I talk about Gulf Shores, AL and Gulf Island National Park.

Gulf State Park

We get up early to get a good head start. We did as much as we could last night to be ready to leave. We drive to the day-use parking lot and hook up the tow car. We don’t need to dump because we have a full hook-up site tonight.

We stop at a Flying J for gas. It has two RV lanes. There is an RV filling up in one and a small pick-up truck in the other. I get behind the pick-up truck. This is the wrong choice. He’s not there. He went inside to use the bathroom, and is waiting in line to buy a Pepsi and then pumps his gas. We can’t back up because we have the tow car. We wait about 30 minutes, and now have to pump gas in the rain.

We get to Gulf State Park at 1:30. We crossed over into Central Time Zone, so we gained an hour. Check-out here is 2:00, so we have to wait while they make sure our site is empty. We disconnect our Honda while we wait.

We back into our site, and it feels more like a neighborhood than an RV park. All the roads are paved with paved sites and neat lawns. Camping here gives you free access to the fishing pier and free parking on the beach. There are many trails here for walking and biking.

We drive to Publix, get some appetizers, and head to Gary & Ellen’s beach house for sloppy Joes and Super Bowl.

We are in this site for only one night. We move the RV to our next site and walk around the park. We visit the nature center and then hike on some trails.

We go Walmart, and then to Gary and Ellen’s for happy hour. We go to the Crazy Cajun for dinner, but there are no customers so we go to the Oyster House instead. We have Oysters on the half shell, fried crab claws, flounder and popcorn shrimp. The food is good, but a little pricey.

The next day we go to the Farmers’ and Fishermen’s  Market in Foley with Gary and Ellen. We buy shrimp, salmon, oranges, eggs, cabbage and honey. We go to lunch at Wolf Bay Lodge. We get shrimp and grits, sweet tea, and salad bar for $10 each. Excellent.

We walk to the end of the fishing pier. Then Gary and Ellen come to the RV for happy hour.

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Gary and Ellen come to the RV and we cook hamburgers on the grill.

On Thursday we go to Publix and then to Gary and Ellen’s to do laundry. We visit and eat chili. It has been a great visit.

Fort Pickens

We have three nights reserved in Fort Pickens Campground in Gulf Islands National Seashore. It’s only an hour and a half from Gulf Shores, but we feel lucky that we found a site for the weekend. We leave Gulf State Park at 10:35 and get to Fort Pickens at 12:35. We have to cross a toll bridge. It is $1 on our Sun Pass. Once you get to the park entrance it’s about three miles to campground registration, then another mile to the campground.

Our site is small. The roads and pads are asphalt, and are surrounded by sand and grass. We back in as far to the left as possible so we can put out our awning without hitting trees. We back in as far as possible so we have room to park the Honda.

We go for a walk around the campground. We see armadillos digging in the dirt. We walk on the Florida National Scenic Trail to the fort and look around.

The next day we drive to Peg Leg Pete’s for lunch. This is a very busy restaurant. We have oysters, shrimp and gumbo. Very good. We drive into town, to Joe Patti’s seafood market and buy grouper and oysters. We take our seafood back to the RV and walk on the beaches. First, the gulf, then the sound. We make blackened grouper for dinner. Excellent!

It starts raining and rains all through the night and next day. No good for outside activities. The rain put a damper on our weekend. This is a really neat place and we have to come back again.

When we found out our friends, Gary and Ellen, rented a house in Gulf Shores, AL for the month of February, we looked for a nearby campground. Gulf State Park is just down the street. Despite having 496 sites, there were no sites for a full week, or even three consecutive days. We did find five days in three different sites starting on Sunday.

Gulf Shores is about 814 miles from Marathon, so we decided to stop twice on the way. We booked two nights at Ortona South Campground, an Army Corps of Engineers park in Moore Haven, FL, and two nights at Manatee Springs State Park, in Chiefland, FL. We estimated that the first leg would take four hours, the second leg would take five hours and the last leg would take six and a half hours.

Ortona South

The day before our trip, we go to the RV to turn on the refrigerator and load some stuff. We disconnect the chassis battery when in storage, so we connect it and try to start the engine. It doesn’t crank. It won’t even jump-start. The battery is only year and a half old. We bought it at Walmart. We go to NAPA and buy a new battery for $161. We install it and it starts right up. The steps are not working again and the leveling jacks are giving us an alarm. We reset the leveling control panel.

We pick up the RV the next day at 9:00. Fran has a hair appointment so we drive to Winn Dixie parking lot.

After her appointment, we hook up the Honda CRV and take off. We stop at a service plaza, on the turnpike, and get to the Ortona South Army Corps of Engineers’ campground at about 5:00.

This is a very nice campground. It has 51 sites, with concrete pads that are large and spread out. It’s quiet and far from the main road. In fact, we thought we were in the wrong place when we turned in, because we could not see the campground. The campground is on the Caloosahatchee River. There are some nice trails to walk, you can fish and watch boats go through the lock towards Lake Okeechobee, or the Gulf of Mexico.

The camp host tells us that the water here is very hard. We hook up our On the Go water softener, but we don’t put any in our tank.
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The next day we cook breakfast outside, and walk around the park and watch boats go through the lock. I clean the electrical contacts for the steps and they are now working again. We have a nice campfire in the evening.

Manatee Springs State Park

Then next day we drive to the dump station and dump our black and grey water. We hook the Honda to the tow bar and leave at 9:10. The GPS suggests two routes. We take the second choice, which is shorter distance, but one minute longer. It takes longer because of all traffic lights.

We get to Manatee Spring State Park around 3:30. We walk around the park. There is a place that sells barbecue they smoke themselves. We buy a half chicken and a rack of ribs ala-carte and bring it back to the RV for later. Then we walk around and see some manatees. These are small compared to what we are used to seeing in the keys. We go to Walmart, we buy stuff to make cole slaw, because the cole slaw at the barbecue place is too sweet for our tastes.

This is a very busy campground. They have 92 sites, which are full. The sites are sand. We have a back-in site with 30 amp electric and water. The water spigot leaks, so we fill our water tank and turn it off. The Verizon wireless signal strength here is low. It’s good for text messages, but not phone calls or internet.

There are lots of trails here. We hike on the scenic trail, with a self-guided tour, about three and a half miles. We walk around the campground and see lots of deer. They are not afraid of us. We have a nice campfire.

Tomorrow we drive to Gulf Springs, AL.