It being a lovely warm day and the start of a week devoid of the hassles of work, I'd arranged with the curvaceously delicious Lucinda to explore Table Rock. Thus, early in the morning just before Crack of dawn, perhaps we should call it Crack of Sharon, Lucinda's motorbike roared into the yard. Stepping off the throbbing beast between her never ending legs, she headed to my car and thus started the adventure.
The drive up was not uneventful. There were as many bad drivers on the interstate as on the regular roads including those passing me as though I was standing still and those that tailgates me as I did 70mph! As usual, not once did a police car appear and apprehend the dangerous drivers. One must assume that the police that are laughably alleged to be patrolling the interstate looking for dangerous drivers are too busy patrolling donut and coffee shops. Isn't it strange that nobody ever robs a Krispy Kreme or a Dunkin Donuts?
The most immediately apparent feature of the Table Rock state park was the visitor center. That was located pretty close to the entrance and looks pretty rustic. Interestingly the bathrooms are illuminated by daylight. Unlike most daylight illuminated toilets in Britain which have corrugated plexiglass roves, this had light piping coming from a rooftop solar collector with backup fluorescent lighting. It worked very well.
The first feeling of the park was one of peace and tranquility. A marked difference after the quite stressful very narrow, twisting road used to get there. Looking at tge park brochure there's parking available for 40 foot motor homes. I'm just wondering what brace soul would wish to manover such a wicked beast along such narrow roads and I do drive busses bigger than that!
On the park map there were two interesting rock formations and two waterfalls listed. I have to be honest and say I only found the one rock formation. The other was off the driving trail and I didn't feel like following a long hiking trail.
Unfortunately I couldn't get close enough to the first rock formation to get a really good photo of it. The closest I got was on a driving trail. My little Olympus with its 14-42 lens is pretty good but the subject was just too far away. One day, after I get my hourglass figure back, I might do the hiking trail and get close to the rocks.
The waterfalls both eluded me. Lucinda, by this time, had wandered off to do her own thing. She likes to fish and close to the welcome center there was a lake so she sat and watched the world go by while using her rod and line.
After trekking around for a while, it was time to hop onto our trusty steed to gallop off into the sunset. Sadly the route took us through Greenville in both directions. I can heartily recommend not driving through Greenville.
As an aside, on the way up, we stopped at a Best Buy where I bought an SD card reader for my iPad. By now you should know I'm doing my blog entries on an iPad mini 2. That reader was horrendously expensive and is horrendously slow. Combined with Apples trifling 5GB of online storage and the non expandable minuscule memory on the iPad, it's more of a tease than something that'll ever truly replace a laptop. Having said that, the photos were uploaded initially onto the iPad in the Table Rock parking lot. Later, on a coffee break, they did get uploaded at a McDonald's on the road home.
And thus ends a beautiful day. One day I'll have to return in my motorhome to spend time relaxing rather than 3 hours of hectic driving with a couple of hours exploring followed by another 3 hours of driving. I want to be like the duck/goose/swan/whatever in the photo I took by the pond - able simply to waddle around in a relaxed manner.
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