Cody’s blog

Cunningham Falls State Park
6709 Cunningham Falls Park Rd
Thurmont, MD 21788

301-271-7574

October 27 – 31, 2024

Cunningham Falls State Park in Maryland was a bit of a challenge. The park has two campgrounds located several miles apart: the William Houck Area and the Manor Area, each with its own address, so campers are instructed to make sure to use the right address for their campground when finding directions. We were staying at the Manor Area, which was the only one staying open through the end of October. However, the William Houck Area is the only one with a dump station, which was closed when we were there. We were told by the park ranger that the dump station might still be usable after the campground closed (it wasn’t) or that we could use the dump station at the Gambrill State Park 20 minutes away. We were hoping to dump our tanks on arrival, since our previous campground had also not had a dump station, but we’d only been there one night so we decided to just wait till the next campground.

Also, while the park had water available, the signs indicating the water stations were pretty hard to spot. But I managed to locate one and fill my water tank.

Then I finally got to my site, which was the most sloped site I’d ever had the misfortune to camp in. After much messing with my leveling blocks, I finally got the front tires under three blocks each, but the van was still so unlevel I could hardly get the sliding door open, and I felt like I was going to fall over every time I stood up in the van.

My brother and SIL had their own issues — their site was more level, but the roads in the campground were narrow and the sites at sharp angles, and there were trees and boulders on the side of the road, making maneuvering a large trailer into the site quite a feat. I was again very glad I’d traded my truck and trailer for a camper van.

Despite our issues getting in and set up, it was a pretty park with lots of trees and nice sites with good privacy. The bathhouse was in the middle of the loop, with a path to it from behind J&J’s site, so I could just go across the road and through their site to get to it.

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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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