We left Walkabout Camp & RV Park and arrived at our new destination: The Oaks at Point South in South Carolina for our 10-night stay. This park is situated about half way between Savannah and Charleston and has plenty of places you can go and check out within a 2-hour radius. We set up camp and relaxed for a couple of days before our good friends the Skeats arrived. From that moment on, for the rest of the stay the kids had a blast knocking around together while the adults also enjoyed each other’s company.
The Oaks has been given a bad rap by a lot of full time travelers and it was time to check it out for ourselves. The staff are nice and friendly along as well as those who live in the park. Some sites are a bit on the small side but ours was just fine. The site we were in was level and that is always a nice plus. While there is no playground at this park it is surrounded by beautiful woods so, you have nature’s own playground for the kids to play in. Play, they did! They spent every day after school working on a “fort”. The park is a little run down and could do with a bit of work and some tidying up. One of the bath houses has not taken care of very well and needs to be remodeled and fixed up. The pool was closed and will not to open until Memorial Day weekend. The clubhouse, while nothing spectacular, was OK and very usable with decent free WIFI there. Cell reception was terrible (as it is with a lot of TT parks) with a lot of dropped calls and the Verizon MIFI struggled some days to work how we would have liked. However, there are some nice ponds behind the campground for those who want to fish. The roads in the park were far better than we had heard and even the morning we left, after 8 solid hours of rain, the park even though very wet, was not the swamp we were told it would be after that amount of rain. The worst problem we had at this park was the biting gnats. We were told by one person who lives there that the gnats are only bad for a couple of weeks of the year and it just happened to be while we were visiting. Over all we will return to this park next time we are going through this area.
Saturday morning the kids plus the Moms tie dyed t-shirts at the clubhouse and all had a lot of fun. Saturday afternoon we went for a little drive over to the Old Sheldon Church ruins about 15 minutes down the road. A lot of history was here on how the church building was destroyed twice: once by the British during the Revolutionary War and then again during the Civil War. On our way home from the Church we stopped at Frampton Plantation House that is also the local visitor center as well as a stop on the American Revolutionary War Trail.
Sunday morning, we held a combined family Bible study led by Ben. Then, we packed some lunch as both families headed off to Fort Pulaski which is East of Savannah. This Fort rose to fame as being completely made from bricks and was held by the Confederate Army in the Civil War. The Union however had other ideas and attacked the fort doing severe damage in a one day barrage of cannon fire. Once the cannon fire breached the outer wall of the Fort, Colonel Olmstead knew that if one shot hit the powder magazine it would mean not only the end of the Fort but the end of his men’s lives. So, he chose to surrender instead. Through this whole battle just one person was killed from both sides. After this no forts would ever be made from bricks again. The Union held Fort Pulaski for the remainder of the war and part of the fort was used as a prison to hold some high-profile Confederate prisoners for the rest of the civil war.
Monday, Jennie and Marti went off for a “Mamas only” day trip. They drove into Savannah where they took an Old Trolley Tour of the historic city that included some of Paula Deen’s personal and professional history as well as preferred seating for the Southern Buffet at her restaurant: The Lady and Sons. Before the tour Jennie had an important job to do first: Go to Pie Society to get Ian some meat pies to give him a little taste of home…Australia. Unfortunately, the shop in Savannah only had 1 (gasp, can you imagine?!?) steak & ale meat pie available. So, a mad dash was made to the nearby town of Pooler to the bakery where the pies are actually created to pick up a total of 4 family size meat pies for the Masons and 4 personal sized meat pies for the Skeats. After that mission was completed, it was all fun and having a great time. Jennie & Marti thoroughly enjoyed their tour and look forward to doing something similar in the future. While this was going on the men were home slaving away looking after all the kids. They were going to have a BBQ but a rain storm washed away that idea so Ben ended up cooking in the Skeats’ trailer while it was raining hard outside.
Tuesday night the campground had a family movie night and we all watched Sing. They even put out free popcorn, sweets and drinks. It was an enjoyable way to spend the evening.
Wednesday there were supposed to be bad storms all day so both families spent a lot of the day up at the clubhouse. The storms really didn’t arrive until the evening and even though it was not too bad we WERE under a tornado watch for a few hours. This was our last day and night here so we packed up ready to leave early the next morning then went back up to the club house to hang out for the evening, had dinner, and all watched the movie RV which the Skeats had never seen before.
The lightning, thunder and heavy rains lasted until around 4am. So, it was a pretty sleepless night for most of us. Everyone was up early Thursday morning to hit the road…
Well we made it safely at Carolina Landing, and Mom met our next door neighbor. So while we worked Mom was talking to him. He was in his 70s, and had a great, great, great, (etc.) grandfather that was on the Mayflower. Our neighbor was in the army, he fought in Vietnam and he is a good natured gentlemen. So, while we were working he gave us brownies for later, he was just kind. Well, we are having a good time, had a difficult time on our school work. But we just went swimming today, and spent time with each other. Yeah, sometimes we are so close all the time we get grumpy, but in the end its just about God, family and friends (that’s what I think). When you get the chance to travel, take it while you are still in this world. Thanks for reading my blog.
Have you ever wondered what those small arms are on a T rex is for, it’s still a mystery today? The next dinosaurs I saw was a Lambeosaurus, a Lambeosaurus uses its two strong limbs to escape its predators. And did you know that you can learn a lot from a fossil that was thousands of years old. There was this other room that had a cool fact, it said that deer run on their toes. Other rooms had fossils of sea lions, sea dinosaurs, interesting shells, prehistoric animals such as a saber tooth skull and really other cool stuff. The room I most liked was the top fourth floor. It had pictures of all kinds of bugs. My favorite was the Blaze of Bees. The 3rd floor had skulls of all sizes some big, small and tinier than a big bread crumb. The last room we were in was supposed to be looking like a dessert. It had interesting facts like a cactus can hold water in its core to survive the years of drought. And I spin a wheel and it landed on a weasel, so Dad said I was a weasel. And I listened to sounds of bats of all kinds. There was a man made home that was for ground owls, I thought that was pretty cool. Then I saw a skull of a whales head, it was bigger than our truck. Then after we were all satisfied with all the information given to us we went to eat our lunch and the headed home. And I learned a lot that day, and I want to come back when I can. And on Friday we went to the gold mine. We actually saw real gold when we were in the shop. And we went through the gold mine cave. We had fun. We panned for gold in troughs. After a cool day in the cave (it was cold in the cave) we went home. On Sunday we went to the church in the lodge. We had a hour service. Then I tried to finish the thousand piece puzzle that was on the puzzle table in the Lodge because we were leaving tomorrow. I did not finish it. But after dinner on Sunday we watched Princess Bride for a movie. Then we went to bed. Well that was our week. It was a learning fun week. I hope you all like my blogs. I appreciate your comments on my blog, my Mom reads them to me.
M5 Adventures 