The Ins and Outs

Nick Woodland 12/2/2023

I hadn’t thought about the humidity.

Towels are constantly wet. There is moisture seeping down the windows. The vinyl seats at our dinette are clingy and sandy since we can’t seem to ever wipe them fully clean. Skin is clammy. Sheets are sticky. We have A/C of course, but we can’t hear each other very well when it’s running and it makes it ice cold in here. I don’t want too much moisture building up inside. We have moisture barrier under all our mattresses, we installed that in Illinois. So we turn off the A/C and go with the windows open and the screen door as often as we can. That ensures that we will become listless and sweaty and that the peanut butter in the pantry will be the consistency of Elmer’s glue and the saltines will be chewy.

I slept in my tent the last couple of nights so Teagan could lay with her momma for a bit. She misses being able to do that. Before we left they would lay with each other most nights. I left the tent flap open (the mesh inside was closed, though, to keep the no-see-ums and rattlesnakes out) and on the first night the evening dew was so heavy it got my pillow and upper part of my sleeping bag damp. So I tossed and turned in the humidity and dampness. The second night (I kept the tent flap sealed up this time) it rained. It doesn’t cool off here when it rains like it does in CO. So I tossed and turned again and woke up to a morning heavy with humidity, oppressive, like a wet shroud was draped over the landscape and I was spent from my futile efforts to sleep.

We get testy with each other and the heat and humidity and rain don’t help. Sometimes I feel like we are all chastising each other for some reason or another. We are all trying to solve each others issues at the same time, no room to get out of each other’s business. Vicious circle. We snap quickly. Like myself standing out in the heat sweating while waiting for someone to finish using the bathroom so they could flush the toilet to flush out the tank so I could detach the sewer line. The A/C was on so no one could hear me outside yelling, ‘Flush the toilet!’ ‘Will someone flush the damn toilet!’ The guy walking by with his dog surreptitiously looked at me. But hell, he probably sympathized.

In Port Canaveral at Jetty Park it was hot and wet and the dew was heavy so we couldn’t keep the sand out of the camper. Take a step into the wet grass and then walk through the sand and bingo another handful of sand inside the camper. Some of us are not very good at stamping our feet to remove sand or God forbid use the hand brush placed conveniently by the steps for just such purposes. Some of us come and go in and out of the camper so many times that my head would spin at the actual number. Hence, sand everywhere.

So when we arrived at our next spot in Jonathan Dickinson State Park and the weather, for the moment, was clear and dry and cool it was like a windfall. I felt rejuvenated. The air was almost like the air in CO on those bluebird days. People were talking about the cool weather. A camp host was overheard saying, ‘Man, isn’t this cool weather nice (for reference purposes it was 63 degrees). I’m from south Florida so I’m always sweating my ass off. I’ll take this!’ People at the boat dock were commenting how it was never like this in November, ‘last time we were here it was 85-90 the whole time’. How awful, I thought. The first day we rode our bikes to the education center and when we exited an hour later Ava – in her tank top – exclaimed, ‘Woah, it’s cold!’ and in her defense it actually did feel cold! Maybe we are getting soft.

That night we had a fire and watched the sparks fly up into the moonlit sky while scrub jays screeched in the sea grape bushes. We took a walk around the camp before bed and marveled at the glamping tents, the luxury RV’s and the foresight and skill of the park planners who designed the camping loops.

After we left Savannah we stayed at Crooked River State Park in St. Mary’s, GA which is also where we hiked out for a night on Cumberland Island. We then visited some family in Ponte Vedra, FL and then stayed at North Beach Camp Resort in St. Augustine and Santos Trailhead State Park in Ocala. The girls visited some friends in Orlando while I stayed at camp in Santos to get some riding in. It rained straight for the two days they were gone. It was a little strange on my own in the RV. I had no vehicle. I ate pasta for lunch and dinner both days.  It was strangely quiet and stable. The RV did not shake. With 5 of us in here it is always rocking a little bit. I did a lot of riding and I did a lot of reading. If you haven’t read Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Kitchen Confidential’, you should. If you are into pre-Saxon history in England you should look into Bernard Cornwell’s, ‘The Last Kingdom’. And if you are a rider and you live near Santos you should go.

The ups-and-downs of this trip are, I think, what make it so great. Sometimes we have a bleak spell. We are all overtired and claustrophobic and sick of each other. The weather doesn’t work out. Little things about each other bother us, like how loudly we eat, or how we ignore one another (I am guilty), or the messes we leave behind (‘why is there honey on the table! Now it’s on my computer!’). The campground turns out to be cramped, or dirty, or in an uninteresting area so we resign ourselves to a few blah days. But then things turn around and suddenly we are in Jupiter Inlet, FL, for instance, paddle-boarding down the Loxahatchee River seeing sea turtles swim under the board through the clear water five feet underneath us. Or we are watching the sun set over the scrub community in a habitat we have never seen before with plants we can’t name. Then the weather closes in; or our patience wears out; or the clothes are all dirty; or the food is too damn hard to reach; or the black tank stinks and someone flushes the toilet with the roof fan on and a waft of sewage comes floating up; or the grey tank is full and now I have to wash the dishes into the pasta pot so I can throw the water outside. 

You get the idea.

Yin and Yang.

Ding and dong.

Ebbs and flows.

This is how it goes.