Florida Beach

Driving around Georgia through the countryside, you come across many small towns, and each one has a square in the centre with the courthouse on the square.  Here is a picture of a really typical town square, with the very picturesque courthouse:

We probably drove through dozens of towns like this during our stay in Georgia.

It rained fairly hard during the night, but had stopped by morning, and it seemed like a fairly bright day, but somewhat windy.  We finally got away from Jerry & Emily's place in the morning, and set off pretty much south (and a little west), and drove all the way down to Florida to Grayton Beach State Park (N30 19 45.2, W86 09 14.9), near Destin Florida.  It was a fairly long drive, so we didn't get in until close to dark.  After a dry morning, we started to get isolated rain showers, at times so heavy you could hardly see the road, but lasting only five minutes or so at a time.  But it was dry when we got there, and we sat out around a campfire with a nice warm night.

17 November, Thursday

The temperature only went down to 61F overnight.  I got up an hour earlier than usual because I had forgotten that we had changed to central time at this park.  And Doreen got up early too without knowing the real time (I didn't tell her, and she didn't realize it until much later in the day!)  This park turned out to be great because it had a washer and dryer, so we did a couple of wash loads in the morning before we left.  Look at this little critter we found in the laundry tub:

 We are definitely far south, as evidenced by the vegitation:

We went down to the beach before we left - it had the finest, whitest sand we'd ever seen - and it went on for miles, with no one on it:

You notice that it is a nice completely sunny day again, after the rain we had yesterday.

We drove west along US 98, which goes along the shore through all the towns, with lots of tourist stores where we stopped a few times.  We finally got on to I-10 (we could just stay on this highway all the way to California!) and cruised through Alabama and into Mississippi to Shepard State Park (N30 22 22.4, W88 37 52.1) near Gautier, MI.

This was an odd park.  Everything seemed really old and dilapidated, including the RVs that were parked there (some looked like they'd been there for years).  This picture of our picnic table gives you an idea of what most of the park was like:

The park was situated on a bayou, which looks just like a swampy area, but is basically the shore area of the Gulf.  It was hard to get a good picture of it because there were so many bushes and trees in the way, and because there is no where that you can get up to look down on it, as nothing is more an a few feet above sea level for miles around here:

It is obviously a good area for wildlife, and here is heron waiting for a fish to swim by:

After such a warm night in northern Florida the night before, our night in Mississippi seemed really cold (42F - not nearly as cold as we'd had earlier in our trip) by comparison.