Some Disappointment

We've been pretty lucky finding places to see and do ... well, today didn't start too well anyway. It rained overnight and we'd left the awning out so it got nice and wet. And my foot had started swelling again, a cause for which we have yet to find. I blogged about my swelling problem back in 2016 in Medical Digression and we pretty much found a lot of things it isn't. It does seem to be related to the heat especially on my foot and perhaps the vibration of the engine. Whatever it is, here it comes again as it has on several of our trips.

Our plan for today was to head out and first locate the Comporium Telephone Museum to make locating it the next day an easier trip. Well, trying to find the museum is how we discovered that the GPS routes drag one all over these rinky dink little roads through developments marked private, no fun to drive in an RV for sure. 

We finally got to Rock Hill where the museum is and found that it is located in downtown Rock Hill and is on what is no longer a road but is now a walkway. There was no where reasonable to park Wolf and in fact turning around was difficult! We decided not to attempt this stop tomorrow although if you are in a car and can park somewhere reasonably close it still sounds interesting!

 

Once we got ourselves sorted out again we headed for the Museum of York County. This turned out to be a little treasure. There is decent parking just below the building probably because they have buses full of school children at times. The museum itself is a naturalist's dream about the Carolina Piedmont.

 

Aimed principally at elementary and middle school children with exhibits, tours, and programs, it is enjoyable and informative for aged adults like us!  Along the hallway are exhibits showing the whole process for the taxidermy and other work necessary to create the exhibits, fascinating! Every where there are displays and presentations of both the terrain and the occupants - flora and fauna - of the Piedmont area of the Carolinas. 

Of course I had to visit the gift shop ... not only do I like souvenirs and reminders but it is also a way to help support the location. I found two inexpensive souvenirs here. One was a small square plate with a howling wolf on it ... a wolf, how could I resist. The other was less than a dollar but brought back memories...

Aunt Kates on the Tolomato River in St Augustine

About three years ago, Geoffrey's sister and her husband were down to visit us here in Florida. We met them one evening for dinner at Aunt Kates, an excellent restaurant on the Tolomato River, part of the Intercoastal Waterway. Geoffrey and his sister were very not interested in them but her husband and I decided to split a bucket of the local steamed oysters.

An Oyster Crab

Neither he nor I knew anything about oyster crabs. Better known by some as pea crabs, these are tiny little crabs about the size of a penny that live inside the oyster.

Now, I know it sounds sort of ewwww! but apparently these tiny crabs are a delicacy and we should have eaten them. But remember at the time we had no clue what these little orange things were in a few of the oysters so we left them alone.

Still not at all sure I would eat one delicacy or not!

Hermit Crab figure

Anyway, back to the Museum of York County gift shop. There at the register they had acrylic boxes displaying several different tiny inexpensive creature figures.

A blue butterfly caught my attention at first but then I saw this tiny hermit crab and it brought back the memories of that dinner and the oyster crabs so I had to get one, especially at the less than a dollar price!

Okay, they don't look precisely alike but there is enough resemblance the memories come back and it's a good memory. I think I will keep it! Besides, I don't think they make Oyster Crab figures.

We left the museum in the early to mid afternoon and stopped at Culvers for lunch, some what of a fast food burger and soft serve ice cream place. There are Culvers locations in Florida but the nearest is over 20 miles away from us in Middleburg and only recently opened so we figured this fell under our rule of not eating in places we can go from home.

Another early evening and bedtime ... we did get the awning dried out anyway.