Entering Hell... Tate's Hell

Thursday, February 24th – Leaving Panama City to Tate’s Hell, Florida – Day 17 

 Another advantage of staying on a Lavender farm is the farm fresh eggs that they put out for their guests in the morning. After eggs and oatmeal, Gen and Mary went back to the store and I started closing up the trailer. Unfortunately, a kid had a bit of an accident in the night so there was a bit more of a process to the clean up. Eventually we were packed up and ready to go. 

 We drove the coast for most of the way to Tate’s Hell. It’s getting tougher and tougher to find campsites. We are checking national and state parks quite a bit. The requirement is a washroom. We have a portable toilet but a fully functional washroom is preferable. Hot showers are a secondary quasi requirement. Tate’s hell has a vaulted washroom. I didn’t know what a vaulted washroom was but it is your typical outhouse with a nice toilet over a hole in the ground. At Tate’s it happened to be a very nice outhouse with a concrete floor and very clean. The showers were a 7-minute drive away at another campsite that had no availability. The unfortunate thing was the water in the showers was full of sulfur. I’ve bathed in sulfur water before, but this really stunk. Luckily, the stink didn’t pass on to your body. I guess if it was that easy to remove the sulfur from the water someone would have done it already but my god, what a smell. 

The highlight of the drive was several fighter jets flying in formation overhead and we saw one taking off which was pretty cool. We needed more groceries and some hardware supplies so we stopped in a small little town. A beautiful lunch at the local seaside park was great – ham sandwiches with cheese, pickles and mustard. The play structure was a pirate ship with a plank for the kids to walk off of, a bunch of slides and climbing portions. I kept calling the kids mangy dogs, catching them and forcing them to walk the plank. Somehow, Gen and Mary found another Goodwill to shop in and went off for a while. 

We finally made it to Tate’s Hell which I kept calling Hell’s Taint mainly because it amused me (much more than it amused anyone else). Our campsite was off the main drag and required a decent drive off the main highway. The campsite was beautiful, there were only three sites surrounded by pines (the pines were planted after the drained the swamps in the 1920’s-50’s, which happened to hit the local estuaries pretty hard by introducing all this fresh water, they then planted pines and dumped a bunch of fertilizer on them to help them grow so you see the straight lines of pine trees everywhere. They are, of course, trying to undo all of this now and turn it back into a more natural ecosystem). The site was right along the river which was a bit murky but beautiful in the sunlight. A fantastic place to camp but a bit rustic.