Trip Report Day 14: Florida, Missouri

What do you do with luckiness? I am in this beautiful place, a quiet campsite overlooking Mark Twain Lake in Florida, Missouri. The sun is coming up, and Dave is puttering around inside. Nola is chewing her Nylabone a few feet away, looking up at occasional sounds from the next closest campers, who are probably hitching up their boat to a pickup and heading down to the lake.

I recognize this as an incredibly fortunate combination of events, being here in this wooded spot, hearing familiar and unfamiliar birds around me, seeing golden streaks of sunlight on this picnic table. But I can’t be sure I feel anything, other than a sense that I ought to feel something. Maybe that’s why I take pictures. They convey emotions I think I must be feeling. Or maybe they do the feeling for me.

The photo tells me to be thankful.

We had some trouble finding this place. Probably spent too long in Atchison, Kansas at the Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum, where I was shocked to learn of the 2017 discovery of a photo that appears to show Amelia watching her damaged plane being dragged in on a barge.

If this is Amelia, she must have felt lucky she survived the crash. It’s likely she was then captured and killed by the Japanese.

Google took us across Missouri but stopped at the Mark Twain shrine, which was closed. A sign said, “If you have a reservation, go to your site and the camp host will be by to check you in.” Nothing about if you don’t have a reservation or where the sites were.

We doubled back to the only other place where we’re seen rigs, though it didn’t feel like a state park. There was an outdoor bar in the center of it, with a thatched roof and barstools, but no one around. I got out anyway and walked past unlit tiki torches, over fall leaves scattered on the cement floor, up to the empty counter. From here, I noticed a couple sitting at a campfire across the park. As I approached, a woman with long blond hair stood up. “Can I help you?”

“We’re looking for the state park,” I called.

She pointed down a road. “Take a right out of here and a left at the stop sign. Go over a bridge and it’s a mile or so down.”

“I think camping is the second entrance,” called her partner, still sitting at the fire, long white beard scraggling down his chest.

“Thank you.” I said. “Um, what is this place?”

“Key West,” she said. All the rigs around her were silent. No one else seemed to be there, just these two and a campfire they were very clear I shouldn’t get any closer to. “Oh,” I said. “Like Florida.”

“We rent by the year,” she explained. “We sold our place in South Carolina, so we’re here full-time, but we just bought another place.”

“Well, thank you,” I said. “And congratulations.”

Signs help.

Gas: 39.61 gallons. Miles: 378.7. MPG: 9.56. Next stop: Springfield, Illinois.