Finne's Follies: March in South Carolina

Well, here we are at Carolina Landing Campground, located almost smack dab on the border of Georgia near Fair Play, South Carolina. We arrived on a rainy day and initially set up in a temporary site because the park was packed. That was Friday. On Saturday we moved to our "permanent" spot where we'll be for three weeks.

It strikes me that camping in a place like this is not at all like camping. We're crammed in between two other RV's, separated by a few feet of grass. It's more like a temporary mobile home park than a campground. Am I complaining?? Maybe a little bit. In the end we have the power to decide where we're going to stay, and everything is a tradeoff. We can get the wide open rustic camping spots if we want them, but they don't come with power, water, and sewer. For those three gems, we put up with crowded parking.

We have a fire pit! Yay!

Driving one's house around on the roadways can be precarious, and the best lessons, as we all know, are the ones we learn from experience. All our cabinet doors are fixed with locking fixtures. They don't actually lock anything, you just have to pull hard to open them, and they keep the doors from opening on the move except in extreme situations like crashing or slamming on the brakes. Since our crash of a few years ago, we learned to find a better way to secure our kitchen cabinet that houses all the dishes and glassware...just in case. No point in losing everything.

This is a bendable rubber covered wire

But somehow we neglected to consider the pantry doors. The kitchen cupboard doors are more susceptible to opening in side-to-side motion, which fortunately doesn't happen very often, but the pantry doors, to our dismay can open when the driver (not naming any names here) slams on the brakes. And that's exactly what happened as we drove through Columbia, SC, in Friday afternoon traffic when a car suddenly pulled in front of us.

I had recently found a fantastic solution to store our wine in the pantry. This wine rack fits perfectly on the top shelf of our pantry...and only the top shelf. The bottom shelf is probably a safer place for it, but unfortunately it's not tall enough.

In normal traveling, the wine sits on the rack quite nicely without moving around. But with that sudden stop, the force of four bottles of wine against the cabinet door was enough to pop it open far enough to let the bottles escape. I heard the crash, and knew things were flying. And breaking. I looked back and saw red wine all over the tile floor, and knew we had to stop as soon as possible to clean up. A few more miles down the road we found a Home Depot and Mark pulled off the highway into the parking lot. While I cleaned up the mess, he went into Home Depot to look for a solution to make sure this never happens again.

Much to my surprise, only one of the four bottles that fell actually broke. But one was enough to leave a big ole stain on my carpet. I swept up as much of the glass as I could from the space between the slide and the pantry and then put out the slide to finish the cleanup. It looks like we're going to need a carpet cleaner.

I didn't think to snap a picture until I was
halfway through cleanup.

Mark found a perfect fix. These Velcro straps cost us less than $4.

After we stopped for the night, we discovered another problem. The floor in the bathroom was wet. And the floor in the bedroom was wet-- soaked in fact. After thinking it over, Mark believes that somehow the fresh water tank, which was full, found a way to slosh into the house. We've seen it sloshing out on the outside of the RV as we travel, but never inside. Now we have another problem to solve, but such is the reality of living in an older home--whether it's mobile or stationary.

This week we'll be looking into what we can do or see in the area. Otherwise, we're just hanging out and enjoying the warmer dryer weather.

Wishing you all a happy Spring and safe travels wherever you are!

More pics...