Normally when we are coming east on I-40 and make the transition south to I-20 on Highway 78 between Memphis and Birmingham, the timing works out for an overnight stay at a favorite campground in Tupelo, Mississippi. But yesterday's destination of Village Creek State Park in Arkansas put us a little farther along than normal, we'll be skipping Tupelo this trip. Besides, we are really getting anxious to get back to the Atlanta area and see the grandbaby. Anniston, Alabama, just east of Birmingham, will be our goal for today.
Anniston has a Camping World Store that also operates a campground about a block away. This place is convenient, just off I-20 and right on our route. We'll spend a little more time driving than we prefer, taking about 6 or 7 hours but this will put us within less than 2 hours of our Atlanta area destination.
We are going to arrive in Georgia almost two weeks ahead of the scheduled start date for our next camp host position at Chattahoochee Bend State Park. Once we got to Anniston and got parked and set up we started looking at our options of somewhere to stay until our engagement started. But after a lengthy session on-line we did not find anything that was desirable. We thought we should give our new park a call and see if they had any campsites available for the time leading up to the start of our assignment. We expected that the hosts we are replacing would still be occupying the host site and that we would take a spot in the campground and just plan on hitching up and going to the dump station a few times since the campsites have no sewer connection.
To our surprise, when we got in touch with our new park they told us that the hosts we were replacing had left early and that we could just come and begin work immediately. We weren't sure we were ready to start work yet, we are kind of enjoying this dinking around and really wanted to spend time with the grandbaby before getting tied down again. But the offer of a full hook up site at no cost was too great. We took the offer to begin early and told them we would be in the next day.
The drive from Anniston to Chatt Bend SP is less than two hours. It is a meander through the woods of Alabama and Georgia on their narrow, winding back roads. For a change, it is a beautiful, bright day and we pull into the visitor center parking lot before noon.
We had met a couple people in the office on a visit to scout the place out just before leaving for Kansas. But now introductions were in earnest and as each person was introduced we learned that of the seven people on staff only two of them had been on the job more than a few weeks. We were coming in with more park operations experience than the majority of the paid staff! This should be interesting.
From the visitor center to the two campgrounds is about three miles of twisting, hilly road. The turns so sharp and the hills small but so steep as to be blind at the crest of every one. Glad I don't have to pull the trailer in and out of here every day. We are assigned campground number 1, the RV campground, and I make the turn in. The camp host site is the very first one past the entrance, just at the opening to the campground loop. The loop has 26 sites, including the camp host site, we pull into number 101 and set up housekeeping.
Of all the campsites we have had as volunteers, this has got to be the best one by a wide margin. First, it's huge! Then the electric power is clean, water is soft and sewer flows great. Our door does not face the road, we actually get to look out over a "yard" with nothing but woods beyond that. Our site comes complete with a cartport and lockable tool and supply shed. We also have a perfectly clean shot at the southwesterly sky, our dish locks on to its three satellites with little effort.
This being a state park means that they are not quite as fanatical about not interacting with nature. They have planted lawn grasses around the campsites and have no problem with us putting our seed bird feeders or hummingbird feeders out. We're thrilled.
We'll meet the host for campground 2 later. For now we are going to soak in this dry weather and great setup.
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