November 27, 2016

The new guy on my left was gone all day yesterday. He returned to the park while I was flushing my black tank. When I stowed my hose, he was sitting at his picnic table with a cocktail in his hands. He remembered my name (which shocked me), and we started talking. I paused our conversation to get a glass of wine. We chatted about a variety of things – what he did and where, what I used to do and where, where he is going and why, where I am going and why – then we broke for dinner alone. We reconvened after dinner and had some more wine. He's a nice man who is having a geographically-inspired existential crisis.

​The banker, the Canadian, the Lurcher's parents, and my new neighbor are the only people with whom I've conversed since I arrived in Charleston a week ago, and all of those conversations happened in my last two days. After five days of waves, hellos, and grunts, I finally had real human interaction.

I rolled out of camp this morning just before eleven, having topped off my propane tank. Google Maps said it would take me three hours to drive 185 miles south to Jekyll Island, Georgia. It took me an extra 45 minutes due to an accident on I-95 which happened in the northbound lanes before noon. As I drove by the scene, there was a car in the northbound lanes facing the wrong direction, and it was missing its trunk and rear seat. It's hard to believe that the occupants could have survived. The northbound traffic was backed up for five miles, and those vehicles would have been there for as much as two hours.

I didn't win Powerball – someone in Tennessee won the $403 million jackpot. I spent $10 and made $4 which is a pretty good negative ROI for Powerball. I'll have to keep looking for work as an alternative strategy.