We spent the past few days relaxing on the beach or hanging out on the lawn in front of the RV. This is a very nice campground and we are enjoying a few days of doing nothing. I went for a long swim one day and yesterday we just floated around splashing in the small waves out front. Warm water and hot days. It is odd that nobody swims here when the water is 74 and the air is 78. The legions of fisherman make up for it though. It’s hard to find a spot to enter the water for the forest of poles that surround the beach.

They go all out on the seasonal decorations here. We walked all over the park and had a look at what they had set out.

Today, we finally broke camp and decided to head for the hills. PJ has been yearning to see the trees turning color and is still ruing the fact that we didn’t go up to Vermont when we were already in Rhode Island. The camper nearest us at the campground was from Greensboro and he said the trees were peaking up at Julian Price park in the Blue Ridge mountains, so we took his advice and are heading that way. The other factor that clinched our decision is that Pam’s cousin lives close to the route we will take going up. We are going to stop in tomorrow and pay a visit.

We drove a couple hundred miles to a campground I’d found online, but when we got there we didn’t really like the look of it. It was still pretty flooded and very buggy. They cater to horse folks and there were lots of flies in addition to the mosquitoes. We continued on to a little country burg called Maxton where we stocked up on foodstuffs at the Piggly Wiggly. We spent some time with spotty wifi from our phones trying to find a campground to spend the night. Surprisingly, many of them are full due to the last season warm weather and the fact that it is Friday. 

We found a site in Dillon, South Carolina just barely across the border which led us past Pedro’s South of the Border, a 135 acre complex including restaurants, a hotel, campground and to top it off, Pedroland, a not so p.c. amusement park featuring lots of sombreros and serapes. You can take a glass elevator up the giant sombrero and have a bird’s eye view of Pedro land. We turned around and went back to check out the campground and get a closer look at the “world famous” attraction. Unfortunately (or probably fortunately), the other thing the South Carolina border is famous for is selling fireworks and Pedroland showed the promise of a night full of explosions. The poor dogs are frazzled enough as it is without the extra stimulation, so we kept moving.

We ended up at the Bass Lake campground which sadly, like Pedro’s, sits right on the I-95. When we pulled in, you could hardly hear for the roar of engines. It turns out that the campground backs right up on a race track and auto racing is really big in these parts. The good part was that it was 5:30 and they were going to quit at 6:00. After that, the highway wasn’t sounding so bad. We picked out a spot and made a nice dinner and rested up for tomorrow.