After a couple days of dry camping in the Ocala National Forest it was time to head back north in search of more electricity and less humans. No gripes about the Alexander Springs recreation area; it was just fine for a couple days but not a spot I where I wanted to have an extended stay. There were a ton of people there enjoying the swimming beach for the weekend. Most spoke in Spanish, so I didn’t strike up any conversations except for a crew of drywall installers that were having a men’s retreat church outing across the road from my site.
If you aim your car at the lower left-hand corner of the Georgia and drive as far as you can go without getting your tires wet you end up here – Seminole State Park. The property is located in the delta between two arms of the sprawling Lake Seminole with the closest city being Chattahoochee, FL – but you can’t get there from here. The ubiquitous Dollar General is nearby, but the closest town with something you would recognize as a grocery store is Bainbridge GA ( a.k.a. “the Bass Capital of Georgia”) twenty miles to the northeast.
The park itself is fairly small, with the focus firmly set on the small protected cove of the big lake it encompasses. You won’t find any historic sites or extensive hiking trails here, but the very remoteness of the park is its greatest asset. Other than locals who use the park on weekends, nobody else seems to know it is here. When I arrived on a Sunday afternoon, the picnic shelters and swimming beach were full of folks, with lots of kids running around and bank fishermen. But come sunset the place was transformed: all the day use people slipped away leaving only a handful of RVs in the campground. By Monday noon, even these rigs pulled out, leaving the entire park to me for the rest of the week.
If solitude is your goal, this spot has it in spades. I had my choice of practically any site in the park, so I setup lakeside near a raft of waterlilies. The shoreline was host to moorhens & chimney swifts, plus a full chorus of frogs and squirrels that liked to run across the trailer roof. On separate occasions I had visits from an oriole, a gopher tortoise and an impressive osprey that was diving from the pines to catch fish. Other than the occasional park service vehicle, there hasn’t been a soul here until a couple other campers arrived on Thursday. If I had a kayak, I could just pop it in the water thirty feet from my camper, and there has been plenty of activity in the lily pads to indicate the bass are eating well indeed from the frog buffet. Kayaks are available to rent across the lake, but I’m not quite ready to test the cargo capacity of a plastic boat just yet. 50 amp power and water, nice bathrooms with laundry, even an extra-miniature golf layout. What’s not to like?
The gnats are present of course (it is South Georgia after all) but they are manageable. Because of the remote location, I think the park is virtually unused most of the time, making it a good option during the high season when other more glamorous parks are full. There are myriad other locations for locals to launch big boats on Lake Seminole and the Flint River, so the only locals that seem to use the park are families and people who want to fish from the bank or a kayak/canoe. Definitely a nice change from recently departed central Florida, where the campgrounds were full of shirtless young guys with camo ballcaps cruising in lifted trucks with their radios blaring Jason Aldean.
Today the rain that has been threatening for a week finally caught me, so it’s been an inside day. Tomorrow I’ll head north a couple hours to revisit the Georgia Veterans Memorial park, from which I will make a couple forays into Plains and hopefully attend church with Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter.
Happy trails!