Planning a road trip, or any other project with multiple variables, is often an exercise in flexibility. Maybe you planned your kitchen renovation to be completed in six weeks, only to learn that you need a specific permit to get started and the local municipality has a four-week backlog. You just happened to see a great deal for flights to Hawaii, but you didn’t know if you could get vacation time away from work that week, and you had a hard time finding an affordable hotel in the same time-frame. You might have the perfect route in mind for your next road trip, and then discover that the parks you want to visit are already booked or closed due to renovation. As much as I like to plan things in advance, I’m reminded nearly every day that the universe doesn’t follow a prescribed order that neatly lines up with my schedule.

So our route out of Florida was based around a maintenance appointment in Wildwood, with overnight stops at whatever parks we could find without driving eight hours in one day. The parks I wanted to visit on our route were of course booked when we began making reservations, so we ended up at a state park we wouldn’t have visited or have even known about otherwise. But first, our service appointment beckoned.

We scheduled our annual maintenance visit a month in advance, opting for an early morning appointment based on the recommendation of the front desk operator. The Alliance Coach location in Wildwood offers onsite overnight parking the day before your appointment, so we chose to take advantage of the parking space and arrived the afternoon before our scheduled service. Alliance Coach seems to focus mainly on large Class A motorhomes, so our 24-foot Class C looked a little out of place parked in the designated overnight parking area full of 40-foot or longer coaches. Even though we were essentially sleeping in a parking lot, Alliance provides electricity and water hook-ups with the complimentary overnight parking, as well as a dump station if needed.

Our appointment was scheduled for 7:30 the next morning, so we dutifully set an alarm the night before to make sure we were awake and ready to roll into the service bay after meeting with our service adviser. We were told that the adviser would meet us at our RV to review the planned maintenance. We really didn’t need much done, mainly just a roof inspection for warranty purposes and a chassis lube, so we didn’t expect the actual appointment to take very long. As 7:45 rolled around with no appearance from our adviser, Ashley walked inside the office area to see what was going on while I got the RV ready to roll.

Turns out our service adviser hadn’t arrived yet, he was running late but we were assured he’d be out as soon as he showed up for work. As 8:30 approached, we finally spotted someone walking to our RV. Our scheduled adviser was either busy or never showed up, but we were handled quickly and efficiently by his replacement. He drove Cecil into the service bay as we rode in the back, and after parking he directed us into the waiting area until the maintenance items were complete.

The technician was finished in less than 45 minutes and met with us in the waiting room to review the few things he did. We thanked him, paid for the service (which was less expensive than estimated, obviously a good thing), and decided to call the state park where we were headed to see if we could arrive a day early. Alliance also allows you to stay the night after your appointment, which we planned to do since we didn’t know how long it would actually take. The park luckily had space available, just not the site we already had reserved. No big deal, we were happy to get on the road rather than hanging around the service center parking lot for another night anyway. Despite the one hour delay in the morning of our appointment, I’d recommend Alliance if you’re looking for an RV service center in central Florida – especially if you have a larger rig. We didn’t really have much work done, so I can’t share any experiences with an extensive service, but we were pleased and the onsite overnight parking is definitely a huge plus.

Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park was the next stop on our route. Located in White Springs, Florida, the unassuming park lies along the banks of the Suwannee River and is well-known (apparently) for the carillon tower which tolls the notes to Stephen Foster songs four times throughout the day. At least it used to – the tower is currently out of commission due to an electrical problem that the park is actively raising funds to have repaired. This immediately brought to mind images of the “Save the Clock Tower!” scene from the original Back to the Future, but we didn’t spot a single DeLorean anywhere in the park.

After three months in the Keys, a few nights in the Florida prairie, and an overnight stop in a parking lot, driving into Stephen Foster was immediately comforting and familiar. We were once again surrounded by trees of all sizes and an environment similar to our shared rural Pennsylvania home state. Despite having no prior intentions to visit this park, we were oddly relieved to arrive. The campground is spacious, with wooded separation between most of the sites. A few sites are located in exposed central areas, but the online map can help identify these ahead of time if you have a preference (specifically sites 2, 4, 6, 13, 14, and 15 are in the open if I remember correctly).

At this point you may be wondering, “Who’s this Stephen Foster guy anyway?” If you know the songs “Oh! Susanna” and “Camptown Races” then you already have some familiarity with Mr. Foster. He’s responsible for creating a portion of early American popular folk music and for revealing the harsh realities of slavery while imparting dignity to African-Americans through his work (according to the Ken Burns’ PBS documentary American Experience).  But his work is also controversial, clearly racially charged and insensitive especially when viewed in the light of modern day. Nevertheless, the reason this park is named after him is because of his song “Old Folks at Home” (the state song of Florida) which includes the lyric “…way down upon the Swanee River”. Spelling liberties aside, this song put the Suwannee River on the map, so to speak, for mainstream Americans in the mid-1800s – despite the fact that Stephen Foster, a Pittsburgh native, likely never even laid eyes on the river himself.  For anyone interested in more of Stephen Foster’s complicated legacy, check out Ken Emerson’s biography of Foster, Doo-dah!

The park is home to numerous special events throughout the year, at least one per month, with the Florida Folk Festival in May and the Festival of Lights in December as the two most heavily attended. The Folk Festival is the largest in Florida, and features the state championship fiddling contest. The park is also one of the few, if not the only, state parks in the country to offer a “Craft Square” year-round. This is a village comprised of maybe six or eight small buildings each housing some type of craft display from 10AM-5PM every day. While not every building is in use every day, you could find the art and pottery building open along with the fiber arts building during the week, and then maybe see a blacksmith working a forge on the weekend. The jewelry building might feature someone working with magnets and wire bracelets, or someone demonstrating how to tie fishing flies. And in keeping with the musical theme of the park, you might even find someone playing the mountain dulcimer in one of the buildings.

After visiting with some of the volunteers staffing the craft village buildings, we learned that the park also hosts a bluegrass jam every Friday night. This isn’t published on any of the park maps or information boards, but it’s apparently popular enough for the local townsfolk to show up and play or enjoy the music from the audience. So when we heard about the jam, I immediately decided to attend with my mandolin in tow, whether I was able to play with the group or just enjoy the music from the sidelines.

While I anxiously waited for Friday to arrive, we spent the next couple of days exploring the park, with walks down to the banks of the river and a couple of very short trail hikes. The forest service was actively logging throughout the trail network, so most of them were officially closed during our visit. We did, however, cross paths with one of the forest service employees as we were taking a shortcut from the campground to the craft village, and he kindly informed us that we were welcome to enjoy the trails because the logging activities were temporarily on hold. He did warn us that the trails were no longer clearly marked, should we decide to explore further. We thanked him, but didn’t venture far into the woods during our visit.

After our winter in the Keys, I have a strongly renewed interest in playing music with other people as often as possible. While the sax isn’t really practical for playing in parks or practicing regularly in the RV depending on our proximity to the neighbors, the mandolin works well in both situations. I can sit in with most anyone and play the sax – it’s not always great, but I can usually hold my own. The mandolin, on the other hand, is still a fairly new instrument for me so I started actively practicing on a regular basis since we embarked on this full-time RV journey, even more so during our time in the Keys. I arrived at the bluegrass jam in the Stephen Foster carillon tower with hopeful optimism, tempered with the anticipation of walking into a roomful of skilled bluegrass pickers.

The seating area was quickly filling as I entered, with the musicians seated in a semi-circle of chairs and the audience surrounding them on three sides in rows of chairs four or five deep. I chose a seat in the audience and placed my mandolin, still in the case, on an open chair next to me. The park ranger at Stephen Foster is himself a mandolin player, and also the person who organizes the jam session. He was seated at the top of the semi-circle, relative to the audience, and surround by a bass player, a man with a banjo, a guitar player, a vocalist, and a fiddler. Someone from the audience with a thick French accent (maybe French-Canadian, I don’t know) was asking about Stephen Foster songs as I took my seat, and the park ranger responded with a demonstration of Foster’s music.

He rose from his chair and began with a story, a little background on Stephen and his life before moving into an example of his music and how it relates to the well-known blues form. While Foster didn’t write the blues in the traditional sense, he was influenced by a very early style of the blues, possibly even contributed to what we now know as the blues in some way, and most of his songs can easily be adapted to the traditional blues sound. So the ranger began playing his mandolin and singing “Oh! Susanna” in a resonant baritone voice, according to the traditional Foster style (actually based on a polka beat) before easily slipping into a bluesy rendition of the same song. The crowd applauded as he finished and returned to his seat in the circle.

The musicians in the circle were clearly regulars and already knew each other, so they easily spotted a newcomer walking in with an instrument. In traditional Old Time and Irish jams, the more experienced musicians form the inner circle, while the beginners fill in concentric circles on the outside. I was totally prepared to sit on the outside and keep up with the music when I could. After he sat, the ranger turned to me and asked what I had in the case. I told him I had a mandolin, but nowhere near as nice as his, and he immediately told me to come on up and make myself comfortable. So I tuned up my mandolin and joined the group.

“What do you like to play?” the ranger asked, as I took a seat in the circle.

“A little old time, a little bluegrass – but I think I might be in over my head here,” I replied.

The banjo player next to me quickly piped up, “Don’t worry about that! We all play a bit, mess things up, laugh about it, and keep goin’!”

With that out of the way, the ranger began calling familiar bluegrass tunes like “Rollin’ in My Sweet Baby’s Arms” and “Bury Me Beneath the Willow” as everyone joined in with their respective parts, while I did my best to play the chords and keep rhythm along with the group. Luckily for me, bluegrass songs have fairly simple chord progressions (in very general terms) and I could play along with most of the called songs, even the tunes I didn’t really know. The regular musicians were taking solos throughout each song while I was content to keep up with the chords in the background. A few more musicians straggled in to join the group, and soon I was seated next to another guitar player and a fiddler beside him.

Each player in the circle began calling songs in turn, and soon the guitar player who recently arrived received the honors. Since he missed the introductions he didn’t know I was a rank amateur, so when the time for taking solos arrived, he glanced at me, I nodded in the affirmative, and played through a chorus for the first time that evening. I don’t have the technical proficiency to play what I hear in my head, but I faked my way through that first solo well enough that the audience applauded and the mandolin-playing park ranger compared me to a pool shark after we finished the song.

“You’re like some guys I know who play pool,” he joked. “You’re taking a solo in every song from now on.”

The night wore on as we played through more classics like “Whiskey Before Breakfast” and “Angeline the Baker” (or “Angelina Baker” depending upon whom you ask, but still a Stephen Foster tune regardless). While I didn’t take leads on every song, I was able to play for most of them while trying to pick up lessons from everyone around me. Since everyone else was calling songs around the circle or playing something solo to entertain the group, I eventually relented and played a quick and very simple Irish fiddle tune for the gathered crowd. It was fine, but I’m already preparing for the next time I have the opportunity to play for others. The evening drew to a close, and I quickly chatted with a few of the musicians and some audience members as the crowd dispersed into the moonlit night. As I stepped outside, I quickly realized I should’ve carried a flashlight with me but I found my way back to our site without incident and excitedly related the events of the evening to Ashley.

We couldn’t have planned an experience like this. I’ve been hoping to find live music as we travel, even better if I’m able to join in the fun. Ashley spent time chatting with the volunteer in the fiber arts building, and we learned more RV-related travel tips from the people volunteering throughout the other craft village buildings. This was an unbelievable event, and exactly what I’d hope to find in an area where we might choose to establish roots once again. Stephen Foster State Park features hiking and biking trails, canoeing and fishing on the Suwannee River, a craft village featuring local folk art, events throughout the year, and a playground for the kids. The gift shop even offers free wi-fi (we did have an issue with Verizon connectivity on our hotspot for some reason, even with a booster turned on) and outdoor seating. All this, and an acoustic bluegrass jam on Friday evenings which I hope continues well into the future.

Things often don’t work out according to a plan, despite our best intentions or attention to details. We wouldn’t have found this park, which quickly became one of our top three favorite state parks, had we followed the original route I attempted to book as we were planning our exit from Florida. And in this case, nothing going to plan could have been more perfect.