Cody’s blog

Charlottesville KOA Holiday
3825 Red Hill RD
Charlottesville, VA 22903

434-296-9881

August 14, 2021

The drive to Charlottesville was fine for the most part, with a few little episodes of excitement, including a cloudburst around 20 miles out, and some winding little country roads, with one left turn across a 4-lane road that was several feet higher on the oncoming side, and a tiny little left turn lane that had just enough room for my truck and trailer. I found out only after I’d arrived at the campground that the directions given by the KOA warned not to follow GPS directions, but to come around from the other direction to avoid just what I’d encountered. Oh well, I arrived safely anyway.

The campground was down among the trees, with a lot of odd-sized sites at assorted angles. My site was curved across the corner where the loop closed. It was easy enough to get into, but getting my trailer straight on the pad was impossible. After a few attempts to pull through until it was straight, and then back in, I decided that as long as the trailer was on the gravel and the hookups were in reach, and the truck was off the road, it was good enough. Thankfully, it was perfectly level.

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Claytor Lake State Park
6620 Ben H. Bolen Dr.
Dublin, VA 24084

540-643-2500

August 13, 2021

Claytor Lake State Park was my first time camping in a state park, and it was an adventure. I arrived around 2 PM, several hours before official check-in time, and began searching for my site. I had a heck of a time finding it — kept driving around in circles, feeling very stressed out and lost, cut a corner and scraped a sign, went the wrong way and had to back out of a row, then finally parked in the overflow lot to go find my site on foot. I got flagged down by the camp hosts in their golf cart, who showed me where my site was, along an empty stretch of gravel next to the trees. I didn’t realize they were camp sites, just thought it was a picnic area. The sites were pull-throughs, but lined up end-to-end, and you had to pull in between the picnic tables to get to your RV into the site. Which would have been difficult if the rest of the sites had been filled, but since I was early and the sites were all empty, I was able to pull into the far end of the row and drive through all the sites to mine, at the other end of the row.

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Baileyton KOA Holiday
7485 Horton Highway
Greeneville, TN 37745

423-234-4992

August 12, 2021

We arrived at the Baileyton KOA at around 2:30 PM, after losing another hour to the time change. The weather was cooler than it had been, so I left the kitties in the trailer while driving. The only tense part was driving through Knoxville. I didn’t see a convenient bypass so I just drove through the city and contended with the traffic, which was heavy on I-40. But about an hour from the campground, we split off onto I-81 to start wending our way north to New York.

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