Thousand Trails - Carolina Crossing

April 20 - 26, 2008

Fair Play, South Carolina

We took a couple days to get here with stops in Evergreen and Chewacla State Park in Alabama. The Carolina Crossing campground is laid out in steppes and they're not very level. We're having trouble with one of our jacks and therefore spent a week "leaning" just a bit!

Fair Play is located on the shores of Lake Hartwell, a large lake formed by the Corps of Engineers dam at Hartwell, Georgia. The Lake is located in both Georgia and South Carolina and has 962 miles of shoreline. The area has suffered a severe draught recently and the lake is at least 15 feet below normal levels. We did enjoy a day kayaking...the water is very clean and there are thousands of "fingers" to explore. It would be a good idea to have a GPS of some sort as I'm sure you could easily get lost if you went too far.

Fair Play itself is not convenient to anyplace. A trip of at least 15 miles is necessary to even find a good-sized grocery store. This is Clemson territory...everything has a "paw" on it.

We did find three golf courses with very good greens fees thanks to our discount golf websites. All courses were less than $20/pp with a cart. We arrived at Anderson Country Club for a 9:50 tee time and because there weren't a lot of people around, we started around 9:30 only to finish before 12:30! Boscobel Golf Club in Pendleton was located in a golf community. The houses were not just lined up along the fairways like you see at a lot of courses...a nice place to consider for retirement; not Dataw, but still very nice. The last course, The Trails at Chickasaw Point, is also located in a golf community. We started our day on temporary tee boxes, awful fairways and terrible greens and found ourselves catching up to the group in front of us. Even though we were waiting forever we weren't "invited" to play through, so we decided to skip a hole and move forward, only to find it was a league (I'm sorry to say a ladies' league). So, we called it a day and went back to relax at the campground.

Even Barney makes a lot of friends on the road.

The colt was born the day we arrived at Carolina Crossing. Here he is about 2 days old.

We'll be on the road now with four stops in five days on our way back up north. Our next destination is Rumney, New Hampshire to have the coach serviced and checked out for our "around the country" trip. We'll then spend a week with Jodie, Dennis and Zander in Laconia and will get back to Falmouth in time for Jen and Chris' wedding on May 10th. For those of you who don't know, they are getting married on Bristol Beach in Falmouth with the immediate family; however, they are not having a reception at this time. They will honeymoon in Costa Rica and I have been given the opportunity to stay with my grandsons, Jake, Ryan and Brody, while they are gone. And of course we'll take plenty of time to spend with Ella and Cassidy as they await the arrival of their new sister in June.

Since beginning our "adventure" last August, we have traveled over 5,000 miles. We have called 28 different campgrounds in eight diferent states our home. We have played golf at 27 different golf courses. We've met many, many interesting people from all over the country (and don't forget our good friends, John and Sheila, from Canada)! And now, on June 1st we start all over again with our big adventure around the country. On the map above, the red pins represent where we have been and the blue pins are for our "around the country" stops. That's a lot of miles, a lot to see and a lot to do!!