Admiral Peary's North Pole Expedition Log: Day 1

Or so it feels... It’s a balmy 24 degrees outside at the moment here in Charleston, SC, and our little heater is doing its best impression of the little engine that could, puffing away trying to heat our tiny canvas home against the cold. We’re the only people in the campground in anything that isn’t hard-sided and well warmed, which says something good about the common sense of the vast majority of campers. But what we lack in sense we make up for in heartiness, so we’re not about to let a little cold stop our trip. We arrived at the James Island County campground around 4:30 and got ourselves set up and the heat on in less than an hour. We’re not doing water tonight, as I’m afraid we'll freeze pipes…and that wouldn’t make for a good start to our travels. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

This campground was recommended to us by camping friends Tom and Dolly who were here a couple of weeks ago (in a hard-sided rig), and they mentioned something about a Christmas lights show going on through early January. We just came back from the three mile light tour (unlike Gilligan, who never came back from a three-hour tour) that runs throughout the park, and it was amazing. Endless light exhibits that cover everything from dinosaurs to space, with plenty of traditional Christmas themes as well. They play Christmas music on an AM frequency as you tour the park, and the music, the lights, and the cold temps combined to make it truly feel like a January winter night. (Shooting from a moving car doesn’t make the best pictures, but here’s something so you get the idea…)

Leaving home this morning was quite stressful, but it happened within about 45 minutes of our projected hit-the-road time, so not bad all things considered. It was around 20 degrees when we got up (like when we're going to bed). That made getting things loaded trickier than we’d hoped, but we crammed it all in just the same. Aside from leaving some food in the fridge that we’d hoped to eat tonight, we seem to have what we planned to have and to have left what we planned to leave. We bucked a nasty headwind most of the way down (I can’t remember who it was that made a joke about us facing a nasty headwind when we hit the road, but whoever it was, thanks a lot!) which made driving more of an adventure than I’d have preferred and reduced our gas mileage to under 12mpg. I wasn’t expecting much better than that overall, but I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

The kids kept themselves occupied throughout the long day, Nan read a book that will no doubt lead to another purging of all things pesticide-treated and/or non-organic from our diet, and I worked to keep us on the road despite the wind’s best efforts to the contrary--and our little Johnson Family expedition is off and running. According to the forecast, it’s going to be cold for three more nights after this one before warming up considerably, so we’re working hard now to keep our attitudes positive and our long johns hiked up...

And leaving you with that probably disturbing mental image, I’ll head off to crawl into a cozy bed of a half dozen fleece blankets as I listen to our heater chant "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can...".

Having fun now!