The Good Life

 Our trip home is taking us thru Prosperity, SC and Dreher Lake State Park.

We're feeling every bit of those words above as we head back home after this cross country trip.  We left out from Raleigh Saturday morning with a give-or-take 4 hour drive ahead of us. I tried to schedule our return trip with less travel each day and a day to enjoy the area and rest in between each travel day. We've really enjoyed our Audible subscription on these long hauls - having just finished our second read-thru of Andy Weirs' Artemis.  (He's our favorite author, and our fave movie, The Martian, is based on his first book of the same name.)

We made it onto Dreher Island late in the evening, after dark, and thankfully right before the sky fell out. Again.

I swear, it's been one rainy day after another here lately.  Thankfully, it cleared up by the early morning and we awoke to a nearly 360* view of the lake.  

We were delighted to find the Steelers vs Browns game was going to be televised, so we set up Brook's Soup in the crockpot (recipe eventually - it's a really great keto-friendly, crockpot camping dinner) and set down to enjoy the game.  

A knock on the camper door (I hadn't checked us in yet) had us meeting our camping host - come to find out, we'd be the only ones in the camping loop this evening and he wanted to see if we were planning to use the bathhouse.  Since we're self contained, we told him no, and he was able to clean up and lock the restrooms for the rest of the week.

What did I take from that? We had the Whole. Island. to Ourselves!

After a disappointing game against the Browns (we were playing our second string after all) we took off to explore "our island" and do a bit of first-of-the-year geocaching.

We found a crab book in one of the caches - it was too cute to leave behind, so I traded one of my tackables for it, thinking I'd drop it off in the next Little Free Library we came across.  Little did I know that next Little Free Library was going to be just a few steps away in the playground of our camping loop!

Our walk back over to the campsite coincided with sunset; and oh, what a sunset it was!

We spent the evening in the camper, watching our favorite movie (if you guessed: The Martian, you're right!)  Diesel, also known as most spoiled dog ever, was right up on our laps, under a blanket, snoring along for most of the movie.

Pretty sure our wall art says it best:

Monday we packed up slowly and hit the road for Columbia, GA for our next stop - but not before RDB took the drone out and grabbed a few pictures of our site.

We were at Dreher Lake State Park, Islanders Camping Circle, Site #61. We would 100% come back to this one again - it was an incredible site with great views of the lake (you could walk right down to the shore if you wanted to.) 30a and water, there is a dump station on site but I noticed Sunday afternoon the line to dump was at least 4 campers long at checkout.   Wooden kids playground on site, several bathhouses through the camping and day use areas - we even noted they have lake front. cabins (small) and villas (large, multifamily) for rent.  Might be worth a drive w/o the camper to come and stay in one of those. Or, we can just come back again - I wouldn't be against that either!

For more camping photos, go here.