Friday, June 30, 2017

Cades Cove Campground


This campground is located within the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.   It is one of the few national parks that charge no fee to enter.  It is a narrow and windy road for about 7 miles to the campground.  We arrived on June 21 for 3 nights, but decided to leave one day earlier as we had  a 500 mile trip ahead of us to Washington D. C. and  we thought it would be better to break it up into two days.  We stayed in a handicap site as there were no other sites available when we booked with the understanding that if someone requested the handicap site they could move us to another site.   This was dry camping so no electric, water, or sewer at our site or in the park for that matter.  There was a dump station and water available in the park, but we chose no to use it as we planned to stop at a full hookup RV park on our way to Washington D. C.  Our site was relatively level, but I did use jacks to pick up the back end of the coach.  No cell service here or over the air TV in this park.  I did not even try to get satellite reception at this park as it was fully treed.  The one way streets inside the park were quite narrow, but I managed to back into my site on the first try.  Of course, I had Aggie guiding me with our ham radios.  We paid $10 per night here with our America the Beautiful pass and I rate this park F****.
We took an 11 mile loop trail in our Tahoe.  There have been 30 black bear sightings this season so far on the trail, but we did not see one on our trip.  We did see horses, turkeys, Elk, and Deer; and Buddy enjoyed the trip as well.  There was a visitors center half way through the trail which we toured some old buildings built by settlers back in the 1800’s.  They also were making corn meal and flour out of corn, the way it was done in the 1800’s powered by a grist mill.   There was a ranger there with bear and otter pelts and discussed how to handle bear encounters in the Smokys’.  This is a very popular park and we enjoyed our stay here.






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