Mammoth Stops Off at Fort Parker State Park

Tuesday 1 December 2020

We were headed to Cedar Ridge to see Edward again and maybe get in some year-end fishing. But I decided to stop off on the way, at a little state park called Fort Parker, to see something different along the way. Seeing Edward is always great but Cedar Ridge is getting awfully boring.

Written at the time:

It's 5:30 and the sun is down, but the western sky is putting on a light show. It's a sick shade of red, though--but perhaps I am only feeling that because I know that rain showers are supposed to move in tonight. It's cool enough (okay; 59) that I'm not in the mood to sit outside. But I should, really I should. I could bundle up in hat, gloves and a double layer of shirt under my jacket and enjoy the last light.....

 

Until my brother called. But it was nice, all the same. I could hear a little road noise, but it wasn't at all close.

 

 

 

 

We got an awfully late start but since we knew it was only a 2-hour drive, there was no rush. I hadn't made the camping cookies the day before, or done any of my packing. About all I'd done was load the food we bought on Monday morning into Mammoth's fridge. I had made a batch of dough for experimental thaw-and-bake dinner rolls, but that was a waste of time because I forgot and left them in the freezer.  I'll try cooking them when we get back, and if it works, I can do another batch for the next trip. But still... damn!

So we ended up leaving sometime around 12:30. I was driving the Jeep and Mammoth pulling the boat, and I listened to the one p.m news on the way. Traffic was horrible!  Big trucks, big gravel trucks showering particles, were speeding down the expressway at seventy miles per hour. Cars, trucks and more cars filled in the gaps. And the wind was horrid, too. I had some lunch with me, but I couldn't take my hands off the wheel long enough to get it out of the travel cooler until we were on 635 westbound. There the traffic lightened up a bit.

I-45 south was better, but still bad. I managed to eat my crab rolls, doritos and jelly beans without making a big mess all over. One jelly bean got away from me--it's still in there somewhere.

My phone had gotten de-synced from the onboard controller early on, but that didn't matter--I had it mounted in the air vent holder up where I could see it from the driver's seat, but suddenly, at some random moment, the holder decided to eject itself from the air vent and crash land in the passenger floorboard. The phone vanished from sight, and there was no way I was going to get it back while the jeep was moving.

I didn't need it, technically, but I had to keep pretty close to the motorhome the rest of the way.

Fort Parker ended up being a lovely little park. The sites are nestled in a slightly sloped hillside on the lake shore. Our site, a pull-through, blocks the view for people who might occupy the back-in sites across the road, but they would still be nice sites to have. One minor annoyance is that our picnic table is on the street side of the RV, where the hookups are.  So if we wanted to sit out on the table and eat, we'd have a gorgeous view--of the back side of the Mammoth Mobile. But it's clear that was the only place to locate a picnic table given the topography of the campground. I'm not complaining.