From South Carolina to New Orleans: Life in a Tiny Van

The Blue Smoky Mountains in South Carolina seen from the Blue Ridge Parkway. The National Parkway, built by the Civilian Conservation Corp in the 30's, exists for its own sake.  It is 469 miles of scenic road in the Appalachians with no signs, no services, nothing but winding beauty and strategic overlooks. The white dots in the foreground trees are ice bits, from a storm the day before.

Some hairy moments from Life in a Tiny Van:

• It’s deep dusk, dry, and the campground off the road is apparently several miles straight down.  Barely the width of our van, the dirt road shows, on the map, a series of extreme hairpin turns.  Out of options on the lovely undeveloped Blue Ridge Highway, we head down and hope the road is clear and the brakes hold because there is no return.

• Blackness surrounds the shoulderless two-lane blacktop. Pouring rain, no street lights, no signs, no place to pull over and no entry to the locked campground…. 6:15 p.m. feels like midnight.  The dark Atlantic is on either side of us. 

Vesta NOT on the loose.  Guess who leads whom? 

• We fueled at a busy corner; I reach into the van for the gas cap and Vesta flies out the door, pleased to have made another escape but frightened by the noise and cars. She races for cover in the shrubs - not the first escape.

Big Cypress in  the Everglades

• Five days without a shower in hot weather in a swamp: trekked hours in water up to our thighs. We ferret out an RV camp, find it jammed with full time residents’ rigs, junked trailers, semi cabs, and rusty pickups. A dumpster-diver collects aluminum cans next to us as we eat our lunch. Where could the showers be...?

• We squeeze by each other in the narrow aisle, try to remember what we traded places for. A can plops on the floor (“contents of the overhead bins may have shifted”) as we gather supper ingredients. Much re-arranging of stuff is required each evening.  Rules:  Return that which you took out to the place from which it came, or it may disappear permanently. Worse, it will be taking up volume unassigned to it, shrinking the small space in which we live.  We think the hostage syndrome may be in effect, because we feel at home in IRV.  

Look hard: range, fridge, sink, counter and pantry are in view.  

All who have traveled have stories of being lost, losing things, losing heart, or wishing to lose his or her traveling companions for a little while. Yet sometimes a steep and narrow road leads to a sublime little camp one has to oneself. Sometimes the road leads to new coping strategies or new friends, beyond the thrill of new sights and experiences. the disconcerting moments are few, and the ecstatic moments are plentiful.  See photographic evidence below.

Since the last writing, we’ve traveled far, including: The Great Smokies National Park in Tennessee/North Carolina; The Blue Ridge Parkway;  Congaree National Park in South Carolina (tiny home of enormous old growth national champion trees); Timucuan National Preserve and Historic Site in northeast Florida, (site of an 18^th century plantation dating from Spanish rule, with grim details of early slavery);  Big Cypress National Preserve (part of the Everglades); The Everglades National Park; the Florida Keys; a bird-heavy National Wildlife Refuge on Sannibel Island, FL; parts of Alabama and Mississippi (a NPS Civil Rights memorial on the Selma/Montgomery trail; Faulkner's home, Elvis' birthplace), and now New Orleans.  Not to mention lots of fascinating country along the the back roads we prefer to travel. Our Alaskan/Floridan friends Gary and Mary Ann Reeves showed us some  civilized parts of the east Florida coast as well as much kindness and generosity.

Purple Gallinule in Everglades.  This bird is as entertaining as it is beautiful, running around on the lilly pads and dog paddling with it's lumpy feet.

World champion Loblolly Pine and Water Tupelo trees in Congaree NP, South Carolina.

Following are some favorite photos (we hope you like birds too), from the incredible Florida wild places.  Gail took the limpkin at Blue Cypress Lake. It's a rarely seen and secretive bird, we are told. The rest are Craig's:

Tri-color Heron

Green Heron

Limpkin

Little Blue Heron. We finally did learn our herons and egrets, which can be confusing.  For example, this Little Blue was white as a juvenile.  A great white egret is sometimes considered a white morph of a great blue heron.  Etc. They were very patient with us.

Yellow-crowned Night Heron

Roseate Spoonbills

Snowy Egret (check out the yellow feet)

Wood Stork (endangered)

The wood stork snaps its mandibles shut in 25 millionths of a second, the fastest known reflex in a vertebrate animal.



Ahinga, cousin to a cormorant. It stabs its fish prey and tosses it into the air, then gulps it.

White Ibis, so plentiful we called them "Ib-eye"

A "gut" in Congaree (a sometimes wet gully)

A red-shouldered hawk, the pale Florida morph. Many and tame, as were all of the birds in the Glades, as well as in amazing concentrations.

Reflection: Wilderness in the Lower 48 consists of small wild areas surrounded by agriculture or habitation.  Conversely, in Alaska small habitations or agriculture are surrounded by wilderness.  Protected wilderness is surrounded by even more wilderness.  In the south, animals have a hard time making it in their little wild islands, and often perish moving from island to island. Road kill is a little visible evidence. 

The Everglades have no elevation higher than 8 feet. Much of it is water and mangroves, the rest is savannah-like plains with a water base:

The Shark River in the Everglades:  60 miles wide, a foot or two deep , about 200 miles long,  covered in sawgrass. Here we stood on a "hammock," a relative mountain at a few feet,  and pretty dry.  Panthers like them.  The Florida Panther is making a comeback!

An inch elevation change (yes, one inch) in the Glades determines which plants and animals inhabit an area.

This Strangler Fig killed its host, a large baldcypress.
What began as an epiphyte became a parasite,
choking off light and nutrients.  

Overlooking Key West from balcony rooms with Craig’s bro David and Joanne, we  enjoyed a good stretch out of IRV.  They flew down from Denver for a few days of sun in the Everglades and the Keys.  We kayaked in the Everglade’s Florida Bay.  At Key West we visited Hemmingway’s house, drank in his old bar, and enjoyed the colorful rumpus on Duval Street (excellent food). Hated to leave! Franchises notably absent, lots of little fish houses, marine outlets and beachwear for sale.  Diverse folks. We also learned about chiggers which we hosted in the Glades (they do not lay eggs in you, they do itch insanely).  Alaskans are put to the test bug-wise there! (January is dryer and less buggy, btw).

Alligator (we also saw a croc while kayaking in Florida Bay, Everglades). One alligtor bellowed at us three times (what a voice!!) while we canoed in a mangrove swamp. He was advising us to move away, we did not argue.

Kingfishers enjoy all the fish in the swamp along with the waders.

Manatee (or manatee nostrils, to be exact)

Now we must choose between refining and adding to the blog or walking around in New Orleans' French Quarter.  Opportunities are rare for blogging/wi-fi  as we usually spend our nights in state and national campgrounds,  thus the long time in between installments. So there is definitely pull to keep going here......but there's really no choice, is there, dear readers?.......til the next time!