At 4:30 in the afternoon on June 23, the Pilot's dashboard read 95 degrees as we pulled into Skidaway Island State Park, and the air through my open window felt like someone had left a dryer door open. We had two tent nights ahead of us on the Georgia coast. Within an hour, Maya had named it "the gnat place."
Why we ended the trip at the coast
When we planned this loop over the winter, two nights near Savannah looked smart. It split the long drive home from the mountains. It put Maya, our future marine biologist, next to a salt marsh. And Skidaway had sites with water and electric for $104 for both nights. We'd spent the night before at a Savannah hotel, where the kids swam until their fingers pruned and I studied the forecast and tried not to notice it.
There was one problem, and we should have seen it coming. Dana's 70 rule says no tent camping in Florida when the forecast dew point is over 70. The forecast for our two nights at Skidaway was 74 and 75. We told ourselves the rule was for Florida. The air on the Georgia coast in late June did not know it wasn't in Florida.
Heat and gnats
The site itself was lovely: shaded by live oaks hung with Spanish moss, a short walk to a bathhouse with hot showers that nobody wanted. Shade, bugs, bathroom. Two out of three is usually a good site. The third one is the story.
We used the electric hookup to keep the Ryobi batteries and our phones charged, which meant the Ryobi clamp fan and the little USB clip fan we bought before the trip ran all night, both nights. At 11 p.m. the tent was still 83 degrees. The kids slept anyway, the way kids do. Dana and I lay on top of our sleeping bags and listened to each other not sleeping.
Then the gnats. Sand gnats come out at dusk and again at dawn, tiny biting things that get through screens and into hairlines. Maya hates no-see-ums more than anything on earth, and these were their Georgia cousins. She wore long sleeves and a hood in 90-degree heat. The Thermacell kept mosquitoes down around the picnic table, but the gnats didn't seem to care. The first night, we gave up and ate dinner in the Pilot with the AC running. That was the low point of the trip. Nico, eating a hot dog in his booster seat, said it was "like a drive-in."
The one great morning
And then Tuesday morning happened.
I woke at 5:50, in what turned out to be the coolest hour of the whole stop, 77 degrees. Maya was already awake, reading by headlamp. I made café con leche on the stove, and Dana and I drank it out of the white enamel mugs at the picnic table while the sky went from gray to pink. At 6:20 all four of us walked out to the boardwalk over the marsh.
It was low tide. The mud flats were covered in fiddler crabs, hundreds of them, each one waving its one big claw like it was trying to get a teacher's attention. An egret stepped through the shallows so slowly it looked like it was thinking about each foot. A breeze off the water kept the gnats away for about half an hour, and the marsh grass turned gold as the sun came up. The air smelled like salt and that sulfur-sweet mud smell that people here call pluff mud. Nobody said anything for at least ten minutes, which in our family is a record.
Maya drew 14 fiddler crabs in her journal. Nico counted crabs out loud to 100 and then quit, because "there's too many, it's not fair." By 9 a.m. it was 88 degrees and the gnats were back, but we had that morning, and it was one of the best of the whole trip.
What we'd change
The Georgia coast in late June is a no for tent camping in our family, rule or no rule. I suspect Skidaway would be wonderful in March or November, and I'd like to come back and find out.
Next summer, we'd spend those two nights in the mountains instead, or drive home from Townsend in two days with a stop at Ron and Linda's. The people in RVs around us, AC units humming, looked perfectly comfortable. We're tent people, and a tent doesn't come with a compressor.
Two nights cost us $104, which works out to $52 a night for a lot of sweat and one perfect morning. I'd pay that for the morning alone.
Maya's journal entry for Skidaway is one page. Fourteen crabs, one egret and a single sentence at the bottom: "Too hot for people. Good for crabs."
