Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Meow Wolf and O

Wednesday, May 25th –Lake Mead National Recreation Area to Las Vegas, Nevada – Day 104  We woke up in our roadside turn out and got ready for the day. Our plan was to go for a swim at Lake Mead, see the Hoover Dam and head back into Vegas. The morning was stifling hot, we were looking forward to the swim.   We drove to the visitor centre at Lake Mead Recreation Centre. We could see Lake Mead on the way. The water was well below the high-water line on the rocks. At the visitor centre we got our passport stamped, filled our water bottles, and received junior ranger booklets. The air conditioning was so nice we set up the kids to work on their booklets and hung around. The kids finished up enough activities that they were sworn in by a very nice ranger before we left.   We decided to go see the Hoover Dam first. We dropped the trailer in the parking lot. We heard it might need to be opened at the security checkpoint and we couldn’t be bothered. The H...

Canyonlands is Another Planet - Pt 1

Thursday, May 12th – Moab, Utah – Day 91  Utah is another planet. I cannot do justice to the sights that I have seen in Canyonlands National Park. They are beyond compare. I would encourage everyone to visit. The pictures we have taken do not convey the beauty of the scenery we witnessed.   We woke up in the morning after a late night. The kids did some schoolwork. We ate our oatmeal. We tried to clean up the dust that was all over the trailer. The wind had subsided in the night and the morning was pleasant and warm. Aisling had made us promise that we would climb the rock that they had all been climbing on. We strapped on our hiking boots and started towards the rock. A quick climb later we were at the top; on the way down, we were looking for pretty rocks.  The road to Canyonlands sits between two buttes with their cliffs rising on either side. The drive was thirty minutes to the entrance. The visitor centre had displays that detailed what each layer of the canyo...

A Desert Forest - Part 4

We finally decided to move to our last destination before the sun set. The Arch Rock Nature trail was next. We reached the parking lot and saw the rocks in the distance, we were debating what we wanted to do. We just started moving and once we did, we found ourselves racing down the trail to the rocks. The kids wanted to play monster and once they started running, everyone else was running as well. We had another poo-mergency with no restroom in sight, the evidence is buried in the desert. There was more climbing on the rocks. We took pictures of the sun setting and took a quick look at the Arch rock before starting back to the car.  Gen was behind the wheel, an hour later we were leaving the park’s south entrance. We stopped at the Ranger station to freshen up in the bathroom and fill our water bottles before heading to our campsite. Luckily, the site was the overflow campsite for the park so was minutes from the outside of the park....