Georgia - Are You Kidding Me?!

Our trip from Alabama to Georgia today (about Sept. 21, 2016) maps out to be right at 4 hours.  We have picked a campground that takes campers by the month.  We are anticipating that we will be around for awhile helping the kids with the move to their new house.  Once they get settled in then we will head out on the I-95 corridor for some Fall leaf-peeping and then return again for the Holidays.

We turn onto the road that leads to our campground and are greeted by large signs saying; "Low Area, Prone to Sudden Flooding".  We move ahead thinking that perhaps the campground is built on elevated ground but were shocked to find that it was even in a lower spot than than the warning signs.  We pulled into the campground and found no obvious office and after sitting in the entrance for some time, were not greeted by anyone either.  We did our own drive-thru and saw that this campground was not suitable for our purposes and that it was time to execute plan B.

Cyndee placed a call to the state park that we were camp hosts for, Chattahoochee Bend, and asked if they had any spots open.  The reply was; "Surrrre, come on down".  It was not ideal as this location was going to be an hour and a half further south than we needed to be but at least we knew it was a good place and we would be able to use the the free-night passes we had earned as volunteers.  We'll set up camp there for a few days and see if we can scope out a different campground in the north suburbs of Atlanta.  The goal being to get into a campground that allows extended stays, is in the northern arc of Atlanta and has full hook-ups.

Chattahoochee Bend State Park

What we thought would be a fairly easy thing to do turned out to be nearly impossible.  We could not find a single campground with more than one or two nights anywhere.  We drove nearly 300 miles trying to find something, anything but it was not to be.  The story was the same everywhere we went, with the construction of a new football stadium, a new baseball stadium and the massive road improvements being done to accommodate those giant venues, everything was bursting at the seams with contractors.  There were waiting lists a mile long at all the campgrounds north of I-285.

Okay, time for plan C.  Again, from our time at Chattahoochee Bend we knew of a campground in Carrollton, GA that we would recommend to people when our campground was full.  Little Talapoosa is a county operated park and allows long-term stays during the off-season.  It appeared ideal for our purposes with the exception that it was almost all the way to the Alabama/Georgia state line.  It will still be over an hours drive to our daughter's new house but at least we won't have to drive through the city to get there.

Little Talapoosa County Park

Little Talapoosa is a relatively new park.  It's 256 acres of campground, trails, woods, lake and river.  The campground is divided into two loops, one for full hook-up RV's and the other for tents with the tent loop having a large bath house and laundry facility.  It is a gorgeous park and if it were not so far away from where we wanted to be, it would be perfect.  But only minutes after arriving we discovered that even campgrounds more than an hour commute to all the construction, they too were full of contractors.  After some discussion we were at least put on a waiting list, which was way better than anywhere else we had been.

Before heading back to Chattahoochee bend we made a pit stop at the tent loop bath house where maintenance people were doing the daily mopping, cleaning and disinfecting.  It turns out that the "workers" were county jail inmates, black and white striped pants and all.  One of them was a chatty fellow and had obviously been doing work at the campground for awhile because when we told him of our dilemma he immediately told us that we really needed to talk to the park manager.  It seems that they had just completed work on installing 10 RV sites in what was to be their equestrian loop.  Everything was dirt and gravel and there were no sewer connections but they did have 50 amp power and good water.

Just as we were getting in our truck to go back to the office, the chatty fellow saw a vehicle in the distance and started waving it over to us.  It was the park manager and he went out to her and had a short conversation upon which she got out of her truck and approached us.  After introductions she said that while the equestrian loop was not finished, we were welcome to a long-term stay while we waited to come up on the wait list for a full hook-up RV site.  Sold!  We jumped on the offer like a chicken on a June Bug.

The caveat was that in addition to not having a sewer connection, the park also had no dump station.  We were going to have to find a honey wagon service and pay to have our tanks pumped out.  We crossed our fingers that there was such a service in the area and put down a months rent starting the next day.  We made a bee-line back to Chattahoochee Bend and started prepping for the move tomorrow.