A place to visit again

On the morning we left Lake Norman, we kept our scheduled appointment at Camping World of Statesville, NC. 

You may recall that we had been having problems with the front landing gear on our 5^th wheel Trailer. Those 2 legs on the front of the trailer are what lifts the trailer up and off the of hitch and then levels the trailer for living. It uses a powerful 12-volt motor and a gearbox to do its job. Mine has a problem which was diagnosed by a capable technician, but they didn’t have a part. We took the part number and hope to get the part and fix the problem now that we are stationary here in Georgia. 

We got on our way south from Camping World late morning and arrived at the Core of Engineers campground about 4:00. 

Hawe Creek Campground is on 70,000-acre J. Strom Thurmond Lake which boasts 1,000+ miles of shoreline. There is excellent boating, water skiing, swimming, fishing, hiking and picnicking opportunities and a campground with 34 electric sites, most of which are on the waterfront. Flush and vault toilets, drinking water, showers, drinking water, a dump station and boat ramp are available. 

Wildlife, including southern bald eagles, migratory waterfowl, wild turkeys and whitetail deer, is abundant around the lake which is said to provide some of the best fishing, hunting, and water sports in the southeastern United States. Anglers fish for largemouth bass, bream, crappie, catfish and striped bass. The large lake offers endless boating, water skiing, jet skiing, canoeing and swimming opportunities.

Imagine laying on your back looking up the tree.

The convenient, pull-through campsites are flat, level, spacious and done in fine, granite gravel. It was great to have electricity for air conditioning after a few nights without up at Lake Norman. This is a place we will definitely revisit for a longer stay! 

Sadly, this campground closed the weekend after we departed. It doesn’t make sense to me that you would close such a great campground in the south of South Carolina at the end of September when it could stay open for another month or two if not all year. Oh well, I should know by now that government decisions don’t always make sense.

Our next stop after Hawe Creek was to be in central Georgia, but that’s not what happened. Come back to find out what Mosey’nMillers did instead.

What happened to October?

Wow! October has flown by almost without me noticing. OK, so the 17^th was my birthday and we went out for supper, but with the weather down here in Georgia remaining pretty much constant instead of summer fading into fall, time slipped by. Darlene & I were getting acclimated to living in our 5^th wheel trailer full time, learning what was expected of us as Park Hosts, and adjusting to having no television and limited Internet access. The ever-shortening days went by and the blogging languished. Now it’s November, we have fixed our Internet access problem, and we’re pretty much in the groove here at General Coffee State Park. So, let me finish the saga of traveling from Indy to Douglass, GA.

In my last blog we were in Virginia heading south. From Pioneer Village in VA we had a fairly short, leisurely drive to Lake Norman State Park near Troutman, North Carolina.

Since I had been having some trouble with my front landing gear on the trailer when raising the trailer to hitch to the truck, we stopped at Camping World (which just happened to be at our exit) to check it out. I got an appointment for the day we were to leave, so it would be a convenient stop. 

Lake Norman is the largest manmade lake in North Carolina. The State Park boasts a great mountain biking network, a swimming beach and bathhouse complex, a boat ramp, and much more. Of course, it has a campground.

Arriving at a campground where you have never been, to find your site & park is sometimes an adventure in itself. So it was that day. Pulling up to the site, I was immediately and undoubtedly convinced that NO ONE could get my rig into that site. Bummer!! The site was long enough. But the road was narrow and carefully guarded by posts and trees which would make backing a 40 foot trailer into the site impossible. That’s an aggravating deficiency of Reserveamerica.com. The computer knows the length of the rig and the site and they match so you get the site. Wrong! I can’t just drop my trailer on the site from above. I have to be able to maneuver it into the site from the road. Without going into a lot of physics and using numerous drawings, you may not understand, but believe me, that site and my trailer were not a matching pair. Stupid software!

We talked to a very nice Campground Host who wanted to help but could not authorize a site-swap. The campground was full but not all sites were occupied yet. There was hope. A call to the park ranger in an office somewhere got me the name and number of a person in a site I could use (don’t tell HIPAA!). They agreed to a swap when I called. Irritated, but thankful for an understanding camper, we got into a suitable site.

One caveat: Lake Norman has no hookups (I knew that when I made the reservation). That’s not a problem for us with the water we carry and the solar panels and inverter to provide electricity. We had a great couple days in a beautiful state park.

Oh, about that appointment at Camping World for my landing gear problem, come on back read more adventures of Mosey’nMillers.