The week after Thanksgiving we babysat our Virginia grandson Zay while his parents went on a vacation to Cancun. Not surprisingly, we had a great time since spending time with family was a prime motivation for living the RV lifestyle. We still brought Zay to day care for part of each workday so he still maintained a bit of his routine and his grandparents were able to stay on top of their game. After his parents returned, it was discovered his daycare class had a CoViD-19 exposure the prior week so his class was quarantined from the day care for the week. Lucky for us, we got to spend an extra day with the little one while the parents went to work. We had already planned on staying an extra day anyway since the Monday night football game had the Patriots as one of the teams and we thought it would be fun to watch the game with our daughter who is a fan along with us. On Tuesday December 7th we headed to Greenbelt Park which was about 2.5 hours away. (BTW Zay tested negative for CoViD but was still ill from a somewhat persistent ear infection and a picture of him eating nicely is provided below.)
Here we are at the Greenbelt Park Campground.
There were very few campers while we were there including weekends. The park had been closed for a couple of years for renovations and had just reopened in November so that, along with it being December, probably contributed to the low occupancy.
The park is considered a hidden gem inside the suburb of Washington DC about 10 miles north of the city. It has several hiking trails, one called the Perimeter Trail encircled the park. We ended up staying one night a the Sweetgum Picnic area when there was a high wind advisory issued the same time frame as the devastating tornadoes hit Kentucky and neighboring states. As shown below, there weren't any trees overhead at the picnic area so the park offered us the area overnight for safety purposes. We've been camping with high winds before and it wasn't an enjoyable experience with a sizeable limb falling on our tent and bending the aluminum tent poles. Besides, the lack of overhead trees provided the solar panels with enough sun to give our batteries a good charge.
The campground host mentioned that deer, including bucks, commonly grazed in the picnic area's field. He said for some reason that was no longer the case but on one of our park trail walks we did encounter a very relaxed small buck in the woods on the edge of the field. It isn't very obvious but there are two spike antlers visible in the picture below. The buck is probably so relaxed since it isn't accessible to hunters and park visitors aren't a threat.
Another thing we found interesting was the root structure of trees along the park creeks. In some cases half the tree root structure was hanging in the open on the creek side of the tree. You would see some trees that had already been through that stage and ending falling into the creek. Sometimes with the tree partially splitting at the base where part of the tree tried to stay upright. The ones I've just described were not little trees but the picture below shows a medium size tree with a root structure that has adapted to the creek side in a fairly unique way.
One other peculiar scene we came upon during our park walks is shown below. How any person, especially a handicapped person, would find that parking spot shown below accessible is beyond me? I assume someone moved the sign (and license plate) from its rightful place as a joke.
In the vicinity of the park were miles of paved bicycle trails. I tried out various trails and one day I used them to browse DC on my bike. I'll put those pictures in a different post for organizational purposes.
On December 16 we traveled to an AirBnB in Bumpass VA for a holiday get together with our children and their families along with my sister.
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