Day 97: Camp Airey, MS

Our options today were to do better than 70 miles so that we could camp near Vancleave, MS, or to do a bit less than 40 miles to reach our present location.  Though we covered the distance before noon, the latter was the right choice, as the humidity is higher than either of us likes, at least when riding while the sun is out.  Off the bike it is made pleasant enough by chasing the shade around the campsite, as the temperatures are barely reaching into the 80s and there are occasional cooling breezes.  But we can't exert too much without working up a sweat.

So we are camping for free at Camp Airey, a USFS campground near Saucier, MS.  It is designed mainly for tent camping, with a central parking area ringed by walk-in campsites.  But the remainder of the site is available for parking RVs.  There is one working water hydrant (out of three) and a toilet with running water and a sink.  So not a bad deal for a free campground.  Plus there is a view of a dammed lake (we are guessing it was only dammed to provide an amenity for the campground, as it is fairly small).

It's worth making note of a few of the more common sites that we've seen in the Gulf Coast uplands.  First, there are a lot of rural homes that still have huge drinking water containers located beside the road that are left over from Hurricane Katrina.  They are 3-4' plastic cubes with a spigot at the bottom, wrapped by a wire metal cage.  Of course they have long since been empty, and most people have cut the tops off the plastic containers and seem to use them mainly to hold their garbage cans, so that they don't get knocked over before being emptied.  Secondly, we seem to pass large natural gas pipelines a LOT.  Yesterday there were several and we saw a few today as well.

It's worth mentioning that this past billing cycle is the first time that we've exceeded our monthly 5 GB data allotment from AT&T.  Something spiked our data usage early in the billing cycle, and I suspect that was caused by accessing the SPOT website.  Unless we have at least three bars of LTE coverage, it takes us forever to log onto it in order to download our GPS tracks.  So we were forced to buy another 1 GB for $10, of which we may use 1/4 before the next billing cycle starts.