Cody’s blog

Stoever's Dam Park
946 Miller St
Lebanon PA 17046

(717) 274-3850

Oct 26, 2024

Our fall adventure began with an overnight stop at Stoever’s Dam Park, a county park in Lebanon, PA. It’s a small park, with only 7 tent sites and 7 RV sites with electricity, all in a row with picnic areas behind the sites. There is no dump station and no water available at the campground, no bathhouse, only a couple of porta potties. But since we were only planning to stay one night, we just brought our water and planned to dump tanks at the next campground.

Driving there was a bit of an adventure — my GPS brought me to the Community Theater site rather than to the campground, and I had to do some online searching and mapping to figure out how to get to the campsite. It was only a mile or two away, but I had to drive back out to the road and down a different entrance.

Once at the campground, settling in was easy. The site was level and I only had to plug into shore power.

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Watkins Glen State Park
1009 N Franklin St
Watkins Glen, NY 14891

(607) 535-4511

September 8 – 13, 2024

Arrived at Watkins Glen State Park and settled into my site. I was right next to the entrance to the loop in a nice level site with tall trees surrounding it. But somehow I never felt really comfortable there. The sites were tight and weirdly angled, so there wasn’t as much privacy as I’d have liked. You can see in the picture that the trees, while many and tall, were sparsely branched at the lower levels, so you could easily see through them to neighboring sites. The car campers in the spot behind me were clearly visible. But I was lucky to get a spot at all — the campground is large, with 276 sites, but most are primitive and only 90 have electric hookups. My sister-in-law had reserved their site earlier, and the electric sites were all booked up by the time I tried to get a spot to join them. I had to get on a waiting list for Watkins Glen and for Robert H Treman State Park, the other park they were planning to visit. I was lucky that a spot opened up at Watkins Glen and couldn’t be picky about the location. I never did get a reservation at Robert H Treman, and ended up skipping that part of the trip and going home after Watkins Glen.

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Sampson State Park
6096 Route 96A
Romulus, NY 14541

(315) 585-6392

June 9 – 14, 2024

We arrived at Sampson State Park at around 1 PM on Sunday. This time, it was only Davey and I, as my cat Mister had passed about a week before. I was sad to lose him, but he was very sick and I couldn’t bear to see him suffering any longer. Traveling with only one cat, and one who was in good health, was much easier and less stressful, however. Davey didn’t like being in the travel carrier and complained off and on during the drive, but didn’t get sick or overly stressed out. He just yelled until he got tired of it, then fell asleep.

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