Saturday June 5th 2021

Today was a cloudy day in the mid to upper eighties with lots of humidity. So far one slow moving rain storm has passed through the area. There is the possibility of another later this evening. Shortly after noon, when I was finishing up my walk around the park, a dark line of clouds appeared on the southwest horizon. It took until 3pm for it to arrive overhead and drop some rain. While the storm was overhead, both the western and eastern horizons were much brighter. The moderate rain lasted for close to an hour. Clearly it was a narrow band of rain that was moving very slowly.

My focus for the day was getting settled in here at the Pecan Park RV resort for my two week stay. After finishing up the last few setup tasks, I took a walk around the park. Many of the residents at this park seem to be using the park as a short term residence. There are a lot of families with preschool and school age kids from other states. This is the weekend for these working families. There was a run on the laundry facility and a lot of chores seem to be underway around their sites.

This RV resort is one of the new style large RV resorts. It is laid out in a very regular pattern with multiple straight rows of RV sites. To over simplify a little the resorts are produced with a bulldozer and road graders. First they find land that is high, dry and relatively flat. They clear all the trees with the bulldozer, smooth the ground, establish proper drainage and layout long parallel roads. Then they trench and lay utilities. The next step is to cut in all the sites along the roads add concrete, gravel or pavement to taste and voila you have an RV resort. Adding buildings for restrooms, fitness centers, laundry and pool facilities adds value and changes it from a park to a resort.

Pecan Park RV Resort is one of the better examples. They have left a reasonable amount of space between sites and they have planted a few trees to replace some of the ones bulldozed during construction. The other thing that makes parks like this work is economy of scale. Adding sites doesn’t increase the operating costs proportionally. It just increases the capital outlay.

When I was here in 2016 the park had around 200 sites. To expand they needed to get creative. The new area of the park I’m staying is a long way from the older front section. It seems like you are winding down a road for over a mile, but it is probably less than half of that. The winding road was build by filling in a narrow corridor through a swamp. They have added lots of drainage and retention ponds to manage the water. The new section of RV park is on the next available high ground. It has about 100 sites with its own pool, laundry, play ground and other facilities. It is also much closer to the Intestate and further from the Jacksonville International Airport flight path.

I really like this park as RV parks go. State Parks in the woods with ponds and wildlife are my preference, but as commercial RV parks go, this one is pretty nice. I will be returning when I have an extended window of time. This park’s price structure clearly favors longer stays.