In My New Hometown

For Thanksgiving we hit the road for the short three-hour trip to Crestview, FL (our soon-to-be home town).  Our destination was Eglin Air Force Base. 

Eglin has two campgrounds (Famcamps in USAF parlance).  To make sure I could get to them with no difficulty I made sure I had the location of the gate that allows RV traffic set in my Rand McNaly GPS.

 
  The trip was completely uneventful, boring even.  I arrived at Eglin and was processed through the gate quickly.  I set my GPS to get me to one of the campgrounds and found it full.  Eglin does not accept reservations and has a six-month stay limit so the snow bird homesteaders have flocked in.  I set my sights on the second Famcamp to find that all the slots there were full and some of the tent sites had travel trailers in them.  One of the tent campers told me that they are units that the base is trying to sell off.  It gave the impression I could but the Flagstaff on a tent site but that would have not gone over well.
From Eglin we headed cross-town to Hurlbutt Field Famcamp. 

 This camp area is not physically located on base so there is a little less security associated with entry.  Again this was full except for one spot that seemed to be overflow storage for an adjacent site.  Considering Florida in the winter is prime real estate this should be completely unacceptable.   Hurlbutt has an overflow camping area but we decided to bypass that in search of something more amenable.

We looked at a couple of state parks, Henderson Beach looked nice but I did not want to pay beach price since this trip is mostly business – get our licenses and get the vehicles registered - and then head west.  We ended up going to Fred Gannon Rocky Bayou State Park and lucked out.  We managed to get one night then the park is booked full for the weekend.   The problem with a wing-it adventure is that sometimes you have to work a little bit to get things lined up.
Since it is Thanksgiving we decided to firm up our plans while having dinner at the Cracker Barrel in Crestview.  We arrived at the Cracker Barrel to find a pretty full lot and cars in the RV spots – even though there is plenty of car parking available.  The hostess let us know the wait would be 50 minutes so we decided we would look at other options.  As we were exiting the lot we noticed that two doors down the Waffle House was open so off we go.  While at the Waffle House we figured out that if we did not want to book weekend days we could get a five-day stay at the local state parks.  We decided that tomorrow we would head back to the Hurlbutt overflow area for the weekend and book Gannon for next week.  Dinner and the return trip to the trailer gave us some time to really think about it and we decided if we can do two days at Hurlbutt in overflow, than we can do a week.  After all we are fully equipped for the boondocking experience.