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.
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.
The Crossville/I-40 KOA was one of my favorite campgrounds of the trip, and not just because the weather was thunderstorm-y and significantly cooler (84 F) than it had been up to this point. The campground was lush and spacious, with lots of green grass and trees and ponds, and pleasant walking trails.
The drive to Crossville, Tennessee had been… interesting. My truck’s navigation was mostly very good, but it had its quirks — it had directed me to take a right out of the previous campground’s entrance, instead of left, which would have taken me back the way I came in and right onto the freeway. But it required backtracking maybe 300 feet, and in order to save me that tiny bit of going west instead of east, it took me six miles down a narrow, twisty country road that turned to gravel and had me seriously wondering how I was going to get out of there with my trailer if the road got any worse. But I finally came to the end of the road, where a sharp right turn took me back onto I-40. Whew!
Then, I had studied the map the night before and, in order to avoid driving through Nashville, I had decided to take one of the bypasses that went around the city. There were three: I-240, 440, and 840, and I wanted to take the widest one, 840. But my nav wouldn’t give me that as an option, only straight through on I-40 or the shortest bypass, I-240. I thought I had changed it to I-840, but when I got to the exit for 840 E and the nav didn’t tell me to take it, I thought, Well, Nav, after that little adventure up a gravel road, I think I’ll make my own choice, and exited. Then, instead of calculating a new route based on my choice of bypass, the nav kept telling me to take the next exit and go back! Frantic to get me back on its own choice of road. So I switched it off until after I’d gotten back on I-40.
I-840 was definitely the right choice, lovely scenic drive through fields and trees. Then I noticed in the side mirror that I hadn’t properly closed the little hatch over the electric cord storage on the trailer, and it was flapping loose. Also, it was getting pretty hot and I wanted to check on the cats, but there was no place to stop until near the end of 840. Pushed the electric cord back into its storage and closed the hatch tightly, and decided to bring the cats into the truck to get them out of the heat. I opened the flap on Mister’s carrier so he could get out if he wanted to. He spent most of the drive content in his carrier.
