Camping as a Couple in the Okefenokee Swamp

My husband, Mark, and I took what may have been our first ever camping trip together without our daughter or other family members in 29 years of marriage. Honestly, it's been so long we really can't remember, the way life before kids is hard to remember.

Before our one-and-only Mia was born almost 19 years ago, we did some amazing camping trips with Mark's family and other groups in places like Nova Scotia and the Grand Canyon. Later, with Mia and both our families, we camped in Yellowstone and Redwoods national parks. The three of us have camped on Cumberland Island and in the mountains of northern Georgia. 

During the pandemic just Mark and I camped on our back deck a couple times, but Mia was home so those don't count. We mainly did that out of boredom because we had hardly left the house in two months, but it actually was really fun. 

Mark spent a week of every month for a whole year camping by himself in national parks for a beautiful book he wrote called Lassoing the Sun.

But a few weeks ago we tried another first - just the two of us on a camping trip. We went to Stephen C. Foster State Park in the middle of Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp, just an hour and a half drive from where we live in Florida. It is a designated Dark Sky park, so we planned the trip for the weekend of a new moon, meaning the skies would be especially dark and bright with stars. We don't see a lot of stars where we live, so I was really looking forward to that. It didn't disappoint. This is a photo Mark took on another trip to the campground.

Our drive there, with just the two of us, was...quiet. We both had had very busy work weeks, and we had rushed to get the campervan loaded up to leave so that we would arrive before sundown on a Friday evening. We were both a little out of sorts on that drive, just glad to be on our way. But the fact that we both were so quiet worried me a little about the rest of the weekend. Would we have anything to talk about?

The thing about camping, even when you're an adult, is that it's exciting when you arrive at the campground and start setting up camp. With our campervan, it literally could not be easier to set up - we plug in the van to the electric source and pop the top. It takes two minutes. We hadn't used the van in a while, so this time it took maybe four minutes. But setting up the picnic table, the drinks and food, starting a fire, setting up chairs and arranging supplies always has a first-day-of-school excitement to it. And there is always something to talk about.

The following day we paddled a two-person kayak in the beautiful swamp for a few hours in search of Billy's Island. We hadn't paddled a two-person kayak for years despite owning one (now I paddle my single kayak while he paddles his stand-up paddleboard, but paddleboarding isn't allowed in the swamp, thank goodness. Yes, there are lots of alligators although we never saw even one. But they are there). We were terrible paddlers together! We were all over that swamp. Nonetheless, it was fun and I was glad not to have to keep up with him.

Camping meals are the best and we had fun fixing those together. We played Farkel. We hiked. We saw lots of deer. We walked by a mom with two young boys who were running around with abandon and she shook her head and said, "What can you do?" to which I replied, "Been there, done that!" There were lots of kids in the campground. That made me miss Mia, but we were having our own fun and it was nice to hear the kids having so much fun in nature. There were many empty nesters, too. We laughed about how quiet it got late in the evenings when all the kids conked out. 

While sitting around the fire the first night we bemoaned our decision to stick with a diet and not bring fixings for s'mores. So the next day we bought marshmallows, chocolate and graham crackers at the camp store and thoroughly enjoyed them around the second night's campfire.

And those stars. Ahh. Truly a blanket. We walked with red lights on our headlamps out to the road for a perfect view, which another family had also done. As we all looked up, we saw one perfect shooting star.

We cooked such a big breakfast on our last morning that we weren't hungry enough to eat the lunches we'd made before leaving to return home. A perk of traveling as empty nesters is the flexibility to make unscheduled stops. I did a Google search for parks on our way home and we discovered a gem that we never would have seen otherwise. It was Heritage Park Village in Macclenny. For a small town, this was an extravagant park. It was built to replicate dozens of the city's businesses from other eras ranging from the 1800s to the 1960s, with a big field in the middle and a bandshell for town events. 

Mark and I sat on a bench in front of the old millenary shop, ate our peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches, apples, string cheese and sodas...and talked. Camping with just the two of us was a success, and we can't wait to plan another.