I must say we have had fun putting this post together and reminiscing on all the places we have been! Truly an amazing adventure and we got to see family and friends along the way and even made some new friends for which we are ever grateful! We have traveled to 16 different states and put 9860 miles on the Solitude. Many people qualify a state they stayed in differently and for us that is staying at least one night in the state, not just driving through. We stayed at 50 different locations. That is almost 1 new location a week, however some were just a day while we were traveling to a new location and others were for over a month. Of those, we stayed at: -2 free workamping spots -2 family & friends moochdocking spots -1 Boondockers Welcome spot -2 Harvest Host spots -2 Fairgrounds -7 Passport America locations -2 County Parks -3 City Parks -3 Corp of Engineers Parks -11 State Parks -15 Private Parks Favorite Places We Have Stayed Of course our friends and family are tops on the list!!! Fort Wilderness at Disney is a no brainer, but at an avg night rate of $115, this was a special visit and not a normal occurrence! We stayed in the 1200 loop and really liked the location. It was half way between the lake and the bus stop to the parks. We rented a golf cart from an off-site vendor and had a great time zipping around the campground because it is sooo big! THe amenities were amazing, including the laundry rooms that had a site online you could see if there were machines free to use or how long your laundry had to go! Amazing idea! We stayed 11 nights, which was perfect to visit Disney and the greater Orlando area. We flew our boys down and enjoyed a memorable family vacation! Read about our Disney trip here. Another great, but expensive place was Anchor Down in Dandridge, TN, just north of Pigeon Forge and the Great Smoky Mountains. Beautiful views, great amenities and the sites with fireplaces...oh my!! Read about our time at Anchors Down here. In the reasonably priced private campground category, Belle Ridge Retreat in small town Monterey, TN was a winner. This is a relatively new campground that has some great amenities! Nestled in the woods on the Cumberland Plateau, this beautiful park has tons of trails for hiking and ATV's. You can rent an UTV and go exploring, including caves! The bath house and laundry room is also top notch! Read about our peaceful time here. Best up and coming park is Rest Up Camping & RV Corral in southern IL. When we visited in July 2018, they had just opened and we were one of the first campers. This will definitely be a contender for top park with FHU and lots of activities and a yummy saloon and grill! You can read about our time here. Best Corp of Engineer park had to be hands down Mill Creek COE park on Table Rock Lake in Branson. Our site out on the end of the Peninsula had water views on three sides with amazing sunsets. Great site to relax and enjoy time with friends. Read about our time at Mill Creek here. Best State Park is a tough category because we had a bunch of great parks that we love but Topsail Preserve State Park in Santa Rosa Beach, FL topped the list. How can you beat being that close to the gulf and have full hook ups! A true gem and we met up with friends and had a great time! Read about our time here. We really do need to mention Don Carter State Park in Gainesville, GA as a runner up! Most sites have lake views and with almost FHU (except for black tank), it really was a wonderful park. This is also close to where we used to live in GA so we had a great home base for visiting the old haunts and friends. Read about our time at this great park here. Our best public free spot has to be Mortimer Farms in AZ, part of the Harvest Host network. Rick made a lifelong friend with Pedro the donkey and we enjoyed the hospitality and delicious food they have to offer! We could mention soo many other parks that were close runners up. We really got lucky with some great places to stay this first year but had a couple of duds. Oh well, that is why the house has wheels, right?! For those interested in all the locations we stayed, you can check out our campground tab here. We will try to keep that up with every place we stayed and the details in hopes that it helps others find great sites too. Workamping Gigs We have been fortunate to find some pretty cool workamping gigs in our first year on the road. We have heard horror stories from other workampers and we are happy to say that we did not have any crazy stories to add! We really did enjoy all three of our gigs and, they were all different. -Peninsula State Park- We were camp hosts in one of the 5 campgrounds within the park for a month in July and August. We took care of Welker's campground and Welker's Point day use area. We had about 55 sites that we picked up in after campers left, checked trash and spot checked the restrooms. There was full time staff who cleaned the restrooms. You can read about our time here. -Lee Bottom Flying Field- Here we helped the really cool owners, Rich & Ginger, on some projects around the airfield such as powerwashing and painting picnic tables and a fuel wagon, replace a door and cleaned up a bath house, some landscaping and much more. We spent September and October down on the river bottom and had a great time exploring the area and hanging out watching the planes land right in front of our RV! You can read about our time here. -Val Vista Village- At Val Vista we worked for Cal-Am Food Services in the bar & grill. This was quite the experience, especially when Happy Hour rolled around every day. Rick rocked it in the kitchen and I ran food and drinks out to the tables and pool. You can read more about our experience here We have some really neat workamping gigs lined up for our second year. These workamping opportunities allow us to not only continue this lifestyle, but explore places for longer periods of time that we may not have gone to without the job. We really love all the different experiences and will continue to search out the next cool opportunity. Who knows...we might just be photographers in the near future...hint, hint. Top Places We Visited We also want to identify the top places we have visited and again, really hard to keep this to just a couple so we will post pictures from some of them. Again, we could go on and on because we have seen an unbelievable amount of amazing things! This year has allowed us to see more than we ever would have in our old sticks & bricks life. We are truly blessed and are excited to see what year 2 brings! Speaking of year 2, we are back in the Midwest for a couple more months and then we will be making our way down to TX for some camp hosting and some R&R on the beach for the winter. After that remains to be seen. Now that we have a year under our belts, I am trying to lay back a bit on the planning and see where the road takes us. SHOP AMAZON HERE
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During our time here in TN, we have been able to gt out to many of the local parks, State Parks and even the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Even though the weather has been colder than usual (around 20 degrees colder!) and really rainy, we were able to get out to explore the areas we were in and can honestly say that TN is a beautiful place. While staying in Monterrey at Belle Ridge Retreat, we were able to get out to several parks and explore the beautiful Cumberland Plateau. We found a wonderful little overlook, Bee Rock Overlook, which was named by the Indians for the bee hives that hung below the overlook. This place is an untouched beauty...and a bit dangerous. It is relatively easy to get to but once there it is a bit dangerous, especially for kids. There are no railings or warnings as this is not a public area, but there are plenty of signs at the trail head stating the dangers. You are literally standing out on the rock and could easily go right over the side. Even though it was a little unnerving to stand out there, it sure was beautiful! Sergeant Alvin C. York State Park was another gem of a find. This state park is a bit different than most in that it is the homestead of one of the most decorated soldiers of WWI. The property included a visitor center that gave tours of the property, a grist mill, his home and outbuildings, hiking trails through the woods and a suspension bridge over the river to see his grave site. It also includes examples of life for a soldier in WWI, including a realistic replica of the trenches which were very well done with plaques explaining life in the trenches. Every year they have WWI re-enactments on the property to include ground and air troops. Standing Stone State Park, Cummins Falls and Cumberland Mountain State Park reinforced how wonderful the TN state parks are. Nice roads, well kept trails and overlooks and great campgrounds, not to mentions beautiful views! Another park we found was the Ijams Nature Center in Knoxville. This 315 acre nature center in the middle of the city has a wonderful visitor center and wildlife center, amazing trails for walking or hiking, access to paddling on the Tennessee River or Mead Quarry Lake and a treeline adventure park with zip-lines, tunnels and nets. We did not go on the zip-lines while were there but we did take a walk on their popular river-walk trail, which was a bit of a hike in areas. This property was owned by bird expert, Harry Ijams and his wife, Alice, known as the First Lady of Knoxville Garden Clubs. The area became a gathering place for bird and nature lovers for more than a century. In the 60's several Knoxville area clubs came together to turn the Ijams property into a public nature park and education center. Truly a gem in the middle of Knoxville. Once we moved over to Anchors Down in Dandridge, north of the Smoky Mountains, we knew we just had to visit the first National Park that Rick and I visited while we honeymooned in Gatlinburg. The Great Smoky Mountains never get old for us. The area is just amazing and we wanted to see how the big fire of Nov 2016 affected the area. Throughout Gatlinburg area and the park itself, you can see remnants of the impact the fire had. There are some home and business sites that are just foundations still and mountainsides that are burnt. Even with that being said, the park is still beautiful and left us awestruck on our trip from the Gatlinburg entrance up to Newfound Gap. On another rainy day we traveled the new, "Missing Link" of the Foothills Parkway. This is a picturesque 16 mile drive that runs from Wears Valley to Walland, just east of the Smoky Mtn Ntl Park. The road is of course new and the detail in the pulloffs stone parking area to the beautiful wooden guardrails is amazing. This section of the Pkwy was finally completed 52 years after the Pkwy construction was started. The ride is just beautiful and even though it was rainy and foggy, AGAIN, we really enjoyed what views we could see and the colors. Again, photo warning...they just don't do it justice. We finished up our Smoky Mountain Park visit with a drive through Cades Cove. This area just shows how diverse the Park really is. With the various homesteads, fields, churches and cemeteries, it is a small glimpse into how people, many years ago, lived in the area. It's too bad the weather did not cooperate more these last couple weeks, but we still really enjoyed our time exploring these parks.
We are staying at a real gem of a campground located between Nashville and Knoxville, in tiny Monterey, TN. This campground has just about everything you need. RV sites are big rig friendly with full hookups and WIFI throughout the campground, even in the tent areas. The office is located in a old 100 year old cabin and has a nicely stocked store. The bathhouse is very well done and the swimming pond is man made but looks like it has always been there, carved out of the rock. One of the cool amenities of Belle Ridge Retreat campground is all of the hiking and UTV trails throughout this gorgeous property on the Cumberland Plateau. Anyone camping here can bring their own UTV's and they also allow people not camping to come in and use the trails for the day for a charge. For those that camp without a UTV, they have 2 and 4 person UTV's for rent. We decided to rent one on a weekday, which was a great decision since we had the trails and sites all to ourselves. Again the pictures cannot do the trails justice as to just how steep some were and how rocky and rutted they were. There was beautiful scenery through the woods and as an added bonus, there are caves and waterfalls. Enjoy some of the photos and slideshow. SHOP AMAZON HERE
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