Kentucky

Reservations were made for Memorial Day and the 12 days our Sally will be there. Enquiries were made for Ontario. We’ve suddenly gone planning crazy!!

Two reservations for Canada in June/July are confirmed. Why Canada and where in Canada??

Barbara has relatives in Ontario not far from Niagara Falls and way back in 1975 we actually lived in St Catherines Ontario. I worked in a shipyard on the Welland Canal, which is part of the St Lawrence Seaway linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.

We may have still been living there except for one thing.

What is that one thing?

The Canadian winter! One experience of that was enough to send us scuttling back to Holland for several more years.

We started to explore Nashville TN.

The swamp known as Two Rivers RV Park in Nasheville

It’s kind of weird that we decided to visit Nashville as neither of us particularly likes Country Music. The first part of the week made us question coming here even more, as everything in the city seems to concentrate on parting you from your money. There’s nowhere to park without paying a fortune for it, there is construction everywhere and after 2 hours on a tour bus showing us the sights we decided there weren’t many sights worth seeing!

The Nasheville home of "American Pickers"

Inside were many of the things from the TV show.

As a diversion we searched on line and found that there was a Civil War Battle Field in nearby Franklin and we went there for the afternoon. A gentleman named Bob gave us a very informative tour of the Carter House around which the battle was fought. During the fighting the Carter family’s son Tod came to the homestead with his regiment and tragically was killed in the farmyard.

The Carter farm, look close and you can see some of the 1000 + bullet holes still in the structure

The Confederate cemetery in Franklin TN.

While we were in the area we sampled a few local brews and restaurants, then discovered that the ELKS Lodge for Nashville was also in Franklin and we spend the rest of the day in a trivia quiz there. They also have a Shrimp Boil on Saturday so we signed up for that and got invited to bring the RV over and camp in the parking lot for the weekend!

Nice Lodge

Their own swimming pool

Our Hosts

We are happy Elks and enjoyed our home lodge in San Diego (http://www.elks.org/lodges/home.cfm?LodgeNumber=168) immensely. Since leaving we’ve enjoyed many other lodges and been given a warm welcome everywhere we’ve been. Some lodges were simple a lounge and a lodge room. Others were grand, with golf courses, casinos, campgrounds - all kinds of amenities.

The Franklin Lodge (http://www.elks.org/lodges/home.cfm?LodgeNumber=72) to date has been the absolutely most welcoming ever! And a superb facility with it’s own swimming pool, gym, banquet room, a deck looking down on pastoral landscapes.

I think WOW sums it up best. Thanks to all our fellow ELKS for a great time, we’ll be back!!

Eventually all good things come to an end and we decided to move on to Kentucky.

Keeping with our “No Interstates” plan we took back roads, shown on the map as scenic, thru northern Tennessee to Cumberland Lake State Resort Park in Kentucky. The title seems rather grand and we expected a luxurious park like the COE park we stayed at near Texarkana.

We were unfortunately disappointed.

The layout of the park was poor and maneuvering our 36’ rig around the camp area was tricky. We had to select our own site as there were no rangers at the gate. We chose one of the 2 shown as “Pull Thru” - site #16. When we got there we found that it wasn’t pull thru at all and in fact was way too small for our rig. We backed into the one next to it, which was long enough.

We couldn’t find the power hookup. These are almost always on the left of the site (facing to the front of the RV) because that’s where the connections are (on all the RV’s I’ve ever seen.)

It turns out that the closest one to us was about 40’ away on the small site behind us.

Except it wasn’t a site it was the “Pull thru” for the site we were actually on. The sites in the park had recently had new posts installed with the site numbers on them. Site 15 and site 16 had their posts installed wrong! There was a faded painted number on the asphalt next to the post that was correct however! So the electrical connection 40’ away on the wrong side of the rig was ours! Good job we had a 20’ power cord extension to go with the 30’ cord built into the rig and a 25’ water hose to reach the water connection that was also on the wrong side of the rig and a considerable distance away.

The power pedestal closest and the water to the right of the rig.

We had intended to stay several days but being flexible and not making reservations in advance paid off, next morning we headed out again.

We looked around the night before we left and found what sounded like a great COE park. Unfortunately it didn’t open until May 20^th. Searching some more we came across a couple of parks in Cave City near Mammoth Cave NP. One of the 2 gave 50% discount for the first 2 nights for Escapees and 25% the rest of the stay with full hookups, in a pretty park, and with their own fishing pond. Nice!

So here we are in Singing Hills RV park set to explore the area.