We happened upon this massive park completely by chance when I was still a toddler and my family lived in Georgia. My mother won tickets to a country music festival there by calling a radio station and telling them who Reba McEntire's husband was, so we packed up and went down for the weekend in a small-enough-to-touch-feet camper to enjoy our prize. My parents loved it so much they bought a lifetime membership and it became the site of our annual family trips.
When we moved to Florida in 1999 and the four-hour drive there shortened to just an hour and a half, we found ourselves driving there more and more. We upgraded from the small camper to a camper we could live out of and then to a now-well-used RV as our Suwannee trips grew in number. By my estimate, we travel there 8-10 times per year at the very least for festivals, holiday weekends, and any other weekends we feel like leaving the suburbs for this little slice of nature the park owners carved out just enough space inside of to bring in motorhomes, campers, and stages for music festivals.
At first, I didn't care much for the Suwannee. I'd grown up a spoiled girl with arachnophobia and here my parents were, plucking me down in a place with few toys and lots of spiders. Trip after trip after trip went like this until I suddenly realized how much I loved jumping on the golf cart to ride around the grounds and see the sights. Before my anemia made the journey too painful for me, I used to go on two-mile walks on familiar trails just to see all the sights, people, and quirks in nature like trees decorated with underwear and shoes.
The park has Internet and cell phone coverage, so it's not a complete disconnect. However, both are unreliable at the best of times and practically unusable at 25,000-people events like the Wanee music festival, so going to the Suwannee can mean putting away technology for a while for an unintentional tech detox. More often than not, going to the Suwannee means reading a lot of books, be they print books or ebooks. On one particular trip, I read four novels twice each over the course of three days; on another, I read three in a single night. I'm a reader by heart, but this kind of productivity is exclusive to the Suwannee because technology's hold on me is so much weaker.
One of my best memories of the Suwannee happened around a year and a half ago during a weekend getaway for a family friend's wedding in the park. After all the festivities, I "hijacked" our personal golf cart and took it for a ride even though I lacked the driver's license needed to do so. On its charge, I weaved through forest trails thousands of other golf carts had worn down, tried one or two most golf carts would never be powerful enough to traverse, came far too close to the giant webs of many, many spiders, and ended up outside a horse stable that had been abandoned for years. Gnat-like creatures jumped at my ankles from the overgrown grass, but I parked the cart right there and started reading a novel that ended up being one of my favorites.
Now that I'm in college and don't have the time, money, or opportunities to go to the Suwannee as much as I'd like to, it has become even more precious of a place to me. When I go home for quick holidays or the summer, my parents and I always make sure to make a trip out there just to soak up the atmosphere, drive around on the golf cart to see the sights, and simply laze around in a place far more peaceful than our own household.
Leaving is always a sad event, but it has been years since I didn't feel restored upon driving out the gate to start our journey home.
