2005 Thanksgiving- Day 2- The Bears are active

Everyone has their own way to get ready for a trip. Personally, I have this quirk where every stitch of clothing in the house has to be laundered before I can pack.

When it comes to camping, people are even more particular. Add to that two very different families and some chaos, hilarity, miscommunication, and memory making moments are sure to occur.

To make our way to the campground, S-G, Fuller, & myself got in one car, and headed to the Orlando airport to pick up Austina. Nat & Damon took the other car and headed to Nat’s parent’s house to pick up a boat and assist in packing up their gear and then getting on the road.

From S-G’s perspective our airport run should have had us on the road for about two hours and then half an hour to the campground. The other cars, once packed, should have driven about two hours to make it to camp. And then my parents, driving from Americus, GA, should have met us at camp around 3 pm… all of us already there, with camp mostly set up. I guesstimate that we should have been singing songs around the campfire around 6.

The trip to the airport only took about an hour and 15 minutes. Once again, we followed a map
drawn up by Nat. So, we parked, took Fuller inside (sans stroller, since it was back at the apartment) and found the food court. After eating lunch, meeting up with Austina, and getting Fuller nice and irritated, we got back into the car.

S-G had printed directions from the airport to the state park, but they seemed a tad whack, since the first step said to head west on I-4, towards Downtown Orlando. Well, the highway had a sign for I-4 West that went to the left and another sign that went toward Downtown Orlando, veering right. Since I was getting mixed signals, I decided to take the I-4 W route. We knew we had to get off at a certain exit, so we watched as the exit numbers took us the wrong way. Unfortunately we were now stuck in Disney/ Universal Studios traffic, so we had to push through to the other side, getting off in Kissimmee, and stopping to put gas in the car.

At the gas station, hilarity ensued when S-G purchased a map and we discovered that the reason the directions were wonky was because my little sister had keyed in the wrong airport into the mapmaker. Once we turned around, we were on our way. We were in rush hour/ holiday traffic, but on our way. (And very glad that we went to the correct airport to pick up Austina.)

We arrived around 5:30 at the campground, registered for the three campsites and were given a long list of rules and a warning that the bears are active. I knew that Florida was home to vicious alligators, but bears? I was a tad ignorant on the Florida Black Bear.

Damon & Nat arrived at the Osborn’s house around 11 am and every time we called from the road to check on their trip status, they hadn’t left yet. We spoke with Damon who said that he was told they were leaving in ten minutes, which somehow extended into an hour. We weren’t truly on a tight schedule or anything, we just thought that at least one of the groups should arrive before dark. That group left Stuart around two and arrived around 5:45.

My parents, on day two of their trip from Ohio, had ditched I-75 after sitting in traffic due to several accidents, including one accident involving a Fed-Ex truck and packages strewn across the interstate. Once they switched to state roads, they were moving and arrived at the campground around 6:15.

It got dark around 6, so we were all now ready to get the tents set up and dinner over the fire. The trick was keeping Fuller occupied and somehow quickly fed. And the weather had turned chillier than expected.

We got our tent set up. It was a three room tent that had one wing straight off the back and another wing off to the side. We set up the pack n play in one wing and got Fuller into his onesie and thermal footed pjs. We wondered if it would be enough to keep Fuller warm and Damon suggested that we find the pop up tent my parents brought (having stopped in Chattanooga to pick up stuff we didn’t want to bring on the plane), set it up inside our tent, and it would help insulate Fuller’s wing of the tent.

We started to look for the stuff my parents had brought. They had given us some of the stuff- a big storage box and our camping chairs. We were looking for the popup tent and realized that we didn’t see the other stuff we had left for my parents to bring- the new baby backpack , the popup tent, our pillows, towels, blanket, and my bag of crochet stuff. It was dark and so after trying to search the three campsites for a large black trashbag that my dad had packed the stuff in, we decided to just give up and look for it the next morning.

But would we find it?