Nic and I are still in the Francis Marion National Forest.  We’ve been camping at different campsite than I told you about in my last blog post.  This campsite is closer to town (and Planet Fitness).  It has a through hiking trail that runs along it.  I’ve been told that it goes for 450 miles.  I’ve hiked the trail for a few miles while listening to podcasts and it is very beautiful.  Enjoy this picture of a Smurf house I found along the trail (the house was about 5” tall).

I think the fact that this place is free to stay at combined with the trail and how close it is to town has made this quite the strange campsite.  The strangeness was almost immediately apparent.  The first thing we saw when we got here was 2 boxes of generic hamburger helper and a package of spaghetti noodles propped up against a log.  There was also this bundle of flowers.  There were also some tents, but no one around.

The tents themselves weren’t strange at first anyway.  People often put up tents and go do day hikes or visit local attractions.  It wouldn’t be until later that I realized that Nic and I were the only non-permanent residents.  Yeah.  We’ve been at this campsite off and on for almost 2 weeks and the tents don’t move.  At about 8 or 9 at night cars start to show up to spend the night.  Not every night, just most nights.

Stranger still are the tents I saw when gathering firewood even deeper out into the woods.  Take the one in the next picture for example.  It has porch, laundry lines, and various junk scattered around it.  Hell, it even has a set of golf clubs as you can see in the picture.  The notice on the front is a warning from a forest ranger about it being abandoned, but its date is Sept. 18th.

The inside was decorated with pallets and wicker furniture.  My guess is that the poor homeless person that lived here got arrested and didn’t have a chance to come back for their golf clubs.

The strangest thing to me is this table that someone keeps moving around the woods.  We’ll leave and go to another campsite for a day or two and this thing will be in a different place.

Nicole says she likes this campsite, but she does spend most of her time in the van reading.  The one time she went out walking by herself, she didn’t get out of eyeshot of the van before returning and swearing she wasn’t going out on her own again.

This is our last night here.  I’m not going to miss this place.  Tomorrow (Saturday) we go into Charleston, SC for a date.  The plan is to urban camp in Charleston after we have a night out on the town and then drive to Florida on Sunday.