We would love to go back to the park with our trailer, but such a trip will have to wait for quite some time. Most of our vacation is going to be spent out west this year, so I seriously doubt we'll be able to revisit this park until at least 2011. It was a strikingly pretty place and I can recommend it to anyone who enjoys hiking. I spent a lot of time walking the trails, hitting a few nearby summits, and searching out some really impressive waterfalls.
One thing about this trip was that it was taken in early June, but the temperatures were really low for that time of year. It was even too cold to go swimming. I don't think the highs broke the low 60s the whole time we were there, and it rained heavily much of the time. This made for some great photo opportunities at the creeks and waterfalls, though.
This was our old tent. I think this is the one that we gave away to friends.
The stream beside our campsite.
This view was just a few steps from the door of the tent. I'd love to go back, but this time take our travel trailer.
For what it's worth, this photo was taken on the trip that convinced us to buy a hard-sided travel trailer and dispense with the tent. This was in 2005, a bit more than a year after the Holly River trip. It was at Standing Indian Campground near Murphy NC. A very large black bear raided our camp one night and made a wreck of things, in addition to scaring the crap out of us. Yes, we kept our food stored in the truck, but that didn't keep him from turning everything over and opening up anything that looked like food might be inside. After that, we started shopping for a travel trailer. This is campsite #12, and is a particularly difficult one to reserve, as it is well secluded and sits directly on the creek.
When our children were growing up, we worked our way up from one pop-up camper to another.
ReplyDeleteWe'd pick a state each year and take off, going on site seeing adventures.
One night, it was getting late and we stopped for the night at a little motel with a campground behind it. We were terrorized in the night by a creature of the two legged variety trying to tear the door off of our camper. Since we had arrived late at night, we didn't realize we had bunked down in a bad area.
Not enough space here to go into detail, but after all of these years, at family gatherings one need only utter the words "Westgate Motel" to send a collective shiver through our spines.We sold our pop up and bought a Coachman trailer.
Now that it's just the two of us again, I wouldn't mind having a little pop up.I just wouldn't stop any ol' place in the middle of the night!
Yeah, one has to be careful. We have stopped at a few rest areas on extra-long driving days, but by and large we only stay in National Forest, National Park, and State Park campgrounds.
ReplyDeleteWe bought our little Casita trailer because it's a hard sided trailer (which makes it relatively secure in bear country), and it's small enough (17 feet) and light enough to take into the out of the way National Forest campgrounds that we prefer.