We left Croatan National Forest a couple days ago.  We enjoyed our time there, almost 2 weeks, but it was time to move on.

We set our sites on South Carolina and hit the road.  Conway, SC looked good on paper.  It had some free camping sites near by and Planet Fitness in town.

Planet Fitness has become something of a requirement for Nicole.  She’s pretty serious about getting in shape and we work our at PF exactly 3 times a week.  I’m enjoying the regular showers and the workouts add some entertainment to our days.  We’ve been going for about 3 weeks now and are beginning to see some results.

But I was talking about Conway, SC.  We got there and checked out the camping site.  It was along another river though not nearly as nice as the White Oak River we had had been living next to.  In fact this place was a little trashy.  Broken beer bottles, cans, and other trash where everywhere.  Heck, one guy even forgot to pick up his boat when he was done with it.

We decided to stay the night anyway.  It was hardly the worse place we’ve stayed at.  About midnight a pickup with open exhaust roared into the camping area.  They decided it would be funny to do a donut and splatter our van with sand and mud.  The racket they made woke Nicole up in a panic and she wasn’t able to get much sleep the rest of the night.  It was now the worse place we’ve stayed at.

Strangely the pickup got suddenly silent after doing the donut.  Then about a half-hour later it started back up and left quietly.  It wasn’t until the next day that I understood. I went for a short walk and found where they had lost control of the truck and slid off the road and into the surrounding swamp.  It looked to me like they had buried their front tires into about 2 feet of mud and water.  They got the truck out, but given how long it took them to get it into 4WD, I think that they spent some time knee deep in swamp mud getting the front hubs locked in.

This negative experience meant that we were only one night in Conway.  The next day we headed to Francis Marion National Forest where there are almost a half-dozen free campsites.  We’ve been here about 3 days now and are enjoying it.

We have between 25-40 minutes to drive to the Planet Fitness near by, but it seems worth it so far.  The weather is overcast, but it is warm and in the 70’s.  The biggest complaint I have today is that some jackass over the hill is blaring country music and some other jackass is firing off a 22 so fast that there obviously is no aiming involved.  Miles from anywhere and I have this shit to put up with.

In between workouts I’ve been getting some light reading done and quite a bit of coding.  While I consider myself retired, I don’t want to let my skills degrade.  Given the recent uncertainty in the stock market, it isn’t a given that I will never have to get a job again.  Besides, I enjoy programming again and it passes the time.