Buck Hall

We drove through the rain and made it to Buck Hall campground yesterday afternoon. Saturday's drive from Hamburg, PA, to Fayetteville, NC, was uneventful, aside for the inevitable traffic coming out of Washington, DC. We spent Saturday night at a Cracker Barrel along I-95 just outside of Fayetteville.

It rained overnight and started to rain again as we headed south on Sunday morning, getting heavier as we got closer to the campground. We even had to slowly ford a couple of deeply flooded intersections in Georgetown, SC. The rain finally stopped late in the afternoon. Our campground host said that they have had a fairly dry winter, but the last two days brought two inches of rain.

The campground is in a spur of the Francis Marion National Forest and sits on the intra-coastal waterway just north of Charleston, SC. It is a small campground with only 14 sites, all with water and electricity.  The sites are well spaced and there is a clear view of the waterway and the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge beyond the canal. For $10/night (senior pass rate), it is a pretty good deal. There are boat ramps, a fishing pier and even natural, harvestable, oyster beds right along the water abutting the campground. What's more, there was even enough TV reception to pick up the conclusion of Downton Abbey last night with Speedy's low-fi antenna.

Today started clear and breezy and quite a bit cooler than yesterday, but warmed up enough by the afternoon to break out the motorcycles for a short ride. It was still a chilly ride as there was a brisk northerly wind. We went 16 miles north to the Hampton Hall State Park. It has an antebellum mansion, once part of a multi-thousand acre rice plantation. It remained in the same family from its inception in the mid-1700's through the 1960's, when the mansion and surrounding grounds were acquired by the state.

They have done an interesting restoration. Much of the building was preserved by the last owner, but with plywood and wallboard. The park service took most of that out and also all the failing plaster walls. Rather than restoring all of the rooms, they partially restored some of them so visitors could see the construction of the house. It was originally a six-room house, but was greatly enlarged in the late 1790's by adding two wings, each as large as the original house. Most of the addition is large public rooms such as a 30+ foot ballroom. It was an interesting place to visit and the park ranger giving the tour was very knowledgable--and the camelias are in bloom. It will interesting to compare it to the preservation of Drayton Hall, which we hope to see later in the week.