Our stay at Clark Family Campground in Florida was thankfully uneventful. We had originally planned on only staying a week but ended up adding an additional week so we weren’t feeling quite so rushed. After all, we had to get everything out of our storage area, sort it all, take what we didn’t want to Goodwill or give it to our daughter, get our fifth wheel’s “basement” storage compartment re-organized to hold what we were keeping, and take care of a few other things like having our propane tanks re-certified and fix some minor issues that had cropped up with the RV. All while trying to find time for our daughter and her husband (gods, that feels weird to say) to come visit and catch up on events. Too much to cram into a single week, most definitely.

Upon leaving Florida, we headed up to Savannah Oaks in Savannah, Georgia again to hopefully see and do the things we’d missed back in November, like having lunch at Mrs. Wilkes Dining Room and Bonaventure Cemetery (former home of the statue featured on the cover of John Berendt’s book, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”). We may have to add another week here also, as it turns out, because of something that happened about halfway into our stay…

Lewis was working at his desk table along the rear wall of our RV and I was sitting on the sofa with my tablet computer, catching up on various forums and other internet tasks, when we heard a huge thud-crash noise outside. We both jumped up and looked out the side window next to the TV cabinet to see someone lying on the ground across the street and people starting to gather around him. We went dashing outside to see what was going on, since we could tell that something serious had happened and we wanted to help in whatever way we could. Turns out the gentleman on the ground had been trying to unhook his towed vehicle from his motorhome by himself (he had just pulled into the RV park a short while earlier) and the towed vehicle had gotten away from him and rolled backward to crash into someone else’s fifth wheel, knocking him down in the process.

We called 911 while another camper who was a former EMT assessed the man’s vitals and kept him calm and stationary, and a third camper notified the campground office. The former EMT found out from the gentleman involved in the accident that he was alone except for his dog, and we volunteered to look after the dog for him – one less thing for him to worry about. He was taken away in an ambulance and we are now in charge of the gentleman’s dog and motorhome until his friend can fly into Savannah to take over for us, due to the accident causing a hematoma on the gentleman’s brain. Hopefully the gentleman has a speedy and complete recovery, as we can tell his sweet dog misses him dearly. If we have to stay another week to take care of our own desires, then so be it. That’s what considerate, caring human beings do for each other when the need arises. It just seems to be a more common trait in RVers than in the general public.

It’s been over two months since I last wrote to this blog, but in that time, it seems like our lives have been turned inside out, thrown through an emotional wringer, then hung out to dry in a hurricane. The day after we made reservations at Savannah Oaks in Savannah, GA, we received a phone call. It was our daughter, calling to let us know she was, by accident, nearly four months pregnant and scared. Even though she stated she was scared, we were informed that it wasn’t an emergency and since we had made a rather large, nonrefundable deposit for our next campground, we decided not to go running back to Florida to help her out. Instead, we dragged ourselves to Savannah with heavy hearts and tried to make the best of the two weeks we had booked there. It wasn’t very fun, we saw almost nothing of what we wanted to see, and we worried ourselves literally sick and sleepless the entire time we were there. It almost felt like a prison sentence. Finally the time came to head back to Wekiva Falls in Sorrento, FL and off we went.

When we arrived at Wekiva Falls, we settled in and quickly started accumulating baby items for our daughter, since she barely had enough money to cover her own bills, much less the essentials that a newborn would need. With Christmas fast approaching, we felt a bit guilty that almost all our spending went toward baby items instead of actual presents for our daughter’s use and enjoyment, but what else could we do? Babies need lots of things to thrive and adult wants must take a backseat to them. At least we wrapped the baby items up as Christmas presents to make things feel a bit more festive.

Christmas came and we were emotionally broadsided with another phone call – did we mind if our daughter and her boyfriend just showed up, quickly unwrapped everything and grabbed a some of the Christmas dinner I already had cooking, then left and headed back to his family’s gathering? Um, yes, we did mind, darn it! We’d spent nearly $1000 dollars on baby and maternity things just to be treated like we didn’t matter, and on Christmas Day?! Screw that! We’d already put our own lives on hold because our daughter had claimed to be scared of the situation she was in. The least we could have would be a somewhat decent Christmas together before we got on the road again. So of course even our Christmas was somewhat strained and not the enjoyable family time it should have been. We dished out a bunch of advice to our daughter and her boyfriend, only to have some of it be completely ignored a few days later when our daughter, as she was getting ready to leave from a dinner visit to us, asked what we were doing the day before we had planned to leave Wekiva Falls (12 days in the future) because that was the date she and her boyfriend had set to be married. Nice to fricking be told this by only one half of the couple, and that as she has one foot in her car and is getting ready to leave! Well guess what, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. No, we’re not showing up for the wedding and we probably won’t be back for the baby’s birth either. We’re not going to be manipulated by a pair of cowards who seem to only want the material things we can provide for them because, unlike them, we are responsible adults who know that money is what makes the world go around, not simply happiness and rainbow colored unicorn farts. We’ve grown up, and maybe some others should do so too.