Mammoth Goes Birding…and stuff, Day 8

Tuesday April 15

It is very enjoyable to get up at seven, take Molly on a longish walk, then have a leisurely long breakfast with nowhere to go and only birdwatching to do. And I got up with my hip and left leg not hurting! (much)

We started our walk before Ed got up. We tried to go down to the boat ramp, but a camper had a dog tied outside and it started barking, so why wake the world? We went back, and while going through the grassy area by the visitor center and nature center, saw Tree Swallows! Three of them. Very, very unmistakable and later I got a picture.  Common as mud—I’d see thousands of them this trip—but a new bird for me.  Another lifer, on top of the Prairie Warbler at Mousetail Landing State Park.

The campground isn’t really all that big, but it seems that way because the different areas are far away from each other. Along the main road, from the visitor center to the boat ramp--are some very nice full hookup sites and electric-only sites, all on the left side and with nice wide concrete pads. Along the right are gravel pads…weird. But the site I chose—at the very beginning by the visitor center and nature center and right smack up beside one of the four camper cabins—is gravel and very short. As mentioned earlier, we had to park the Jeep over in the nature center/playground parking lot, but it was safe overnight thank heavens. I was worried. It turned out another car was parked all night too, a few spots away, right underneath the streetlight.  So we may have been safer than I thought, but still worrisome with the gate wide open and the entrance right nearby.

The weather turned off cold--gale-force winds of 20-30 mph—and rainy. Despite the app telling me it was going to quit raining by eleven, it kept it up through 1pm or so. We went for a drive to some of the wildlife refuges in the area and never got out of the car.

Then to the candy store/cheese barn. Should have bought some cheese; I got some candy for the kids and some horrible fake yogurt pretzels for myself. They weren’t real pretzels, just cookies. Yuck.

We returned to find it was still cold and blustery, but Molly needed a walk. I put on my windbreaker over the hoodie and we went on a few trails and then up the road to the other side of the lake.

There was a trailhead there for several trails, and although the sign said that the trail we took went to the campground, I couldn’t figure out how it was supposed to get there. We ended up on the disc golf  course, and from a look through the binoculars, there was no way to cross the lake back to the correct side. So we backtracked a bit and ended up at the boat ramp. I knew my way back from there—pass the full hookup sites and up the hill.

So I conclude, the park has some great trails but the maps are confusing as heck. 

 Interesting—the Buckeye Trail is actually part of the statewide trail, a 1,444-mile loop around the state of Ohio. I should have kept on going.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Tree swallows!

 

And a bluebird repairing his bike

 

Mammoth Goes Birding…and stuff, Day 7

Monday April 14

The drive today was to Findley State Park, and I have no notes at all to remind me of how it went.  The park was very nice, like all Ohio State Parks. There was no one at the gate but I’d learned online that we needed to fill our fresh water tank there because the water at the dump station was shut off. It turned out (later) that was not true, and in fact, the full hookup sites which we didn’t reserve had working water at their sites.

Our site was just a trifle too short to park the motorhome and Jeep in. I knew that, and it typically isn’t a problem because we get a windshield tag for the Jeep and can park it in overflow parking. But with no one in the office, we’d have to park it tagless. The campground host I spoke to said that there wouldn’t be anyone at the office that day, but we could park our Jeep in the Visitor Center parking lot and no one would tow it. So we did.  It was in sight of the Motorhome but not as close as I’d like it.

 

After we were settled, Molly and I went for a long jog. We ended up on the Storybook Trail which ran together with the Buckeye Trail for a while. It was a very nice trail, mostly small gravel with only a few muddy spots.

 

The Lorax!

 

 

We didn’t see much, but we got some jogging in. Before that we jogged through the campground loop and ended up at the lake. Probably on the same trail, just at another end. I don’t know exactly—I find the whole place and especially the map very confusing.  (I’d picked up campground and trail maps at the office—best I can tell, they were completely out of scale and missing in important details.)

 The day use area

 

 

Mammoth Goes Birding…and stuff, Day 6

 Sunday April 13

Bye, Dino valley!

 

 

 We treated ourselves to breakfast at the Watermill restaurant at the top of the hill. In walking distance, but since the Jeep was already unhooked and because hill, we drove.

It was good but not great. A buffet. The scrambled eggs were tasteless, but the biscuits and cooked apples were great.

 

 

Then the drive to East Fork State Park was very trafficky and bad, but short. Somewhere in Kentucky the time zone changed.  It’s always fun to lose an hour in the middle of a drive…not.

 

The campground was easy to find. We filled up water at the dump station but had to block one of the two dump sites to do so, probably annoying the several campers waiting in line to dump. Not our fault—they should have been out of the park two hours earlier.  It was a weird arrangement, having the water fill situated so that it blocked a dump site, but I imagine the logic was that people wouldn’t be filling water (on the way in, typically) while people were dumping (on the way out, typically).

It was a lovely park on a lake.  The campground consisted of a very long, straightish road with “loops” A-L widely spread out along it. We were in the very last site in Loop L.  Like all Ohio State Parks I’ve been in, it was immaculately clean and very well maintained. Although they’d trimmed the brush back a little too vigorously, for my taste—it looked hacked. 

They’d apparently suffered some flooding recently—the campground road went on to the boat ramp and swimming area, but that was all under water. They had a Road Closed sign up with barriers, but Ed and I walked down there.  Typically at boat ramps there’s a sign “road ends in water” but in this case, the road really DID end in water.  You couldn’t even see the signs.

No birds except blue winged teal on the lake, towhees galore, and a bald eagle circling the lake. I didn’t get a good look at it, but most likely it was an immature bald eagle.  All I know is that it was certainly an eagle.

 

The campground was very empty—nice.  Only one other camper came to our loop, arriving after we did, but you couldn’t see them from our site. They were back in the loop part of the loop while we were in a straight part…odd design but nice. 

At 6pm, when I wrote this, it was still 55 or 60 degrees outside. On our evening walk Molly and I saw one deer and 3 bats.

Mammoth Goes Birding…and stuff, Day 5

Saturday, April 12

We remained in place to give our driver and passenger a rest, so today’s agenda was a day trip to Mammoth Cave National Park to hike some of the little trails. Our first trail took us down to a cave opening, which I think might have been the original opening. People were coming out of it from some tour or other. We weren’t allowed in, of course.

Then we went on around a circle toward a scenic overlook that another male hiker said was well worth the climb. We got almost up to it and gave up. The uphills were proving too challenging. I regretted not going on almost immediately, but that was the way it needed to be.

 Got to the river, but not the overlook:

Then we drove over to a walk around a big sinkhole and probably a lot of little ones. It was lovely.  No birds, though. I heard a Louisiana Waterthrush but never could get sight of him. My experience with them is that they sit perfectly still while they’re singing, and the only way I managed to stalk one before is that I found two of them singing back and forth at each other, and the one nearest me was gradually moving up the hill—probably to get closer to his rival.

But the big beautiful trees!  Magnificent. Mostly leafless. Both dogwood and redbud were in bloom, which is funny because at home my redbud blooms a lot earlier.

For dinner we made some excellent Poke. We tweaked the recipe a little, but only by adding in the extra ingredients up front rather than using them as toppings to each serving.

 

REVIEW: Dino Valley RV Park  $62

Convenient; not so cheap; but location!

For a trip to Mammoth Cave National Park, this is pretty unbeatable. We stayed at a different RV park in the area last time, but it was crowded and uncomfortable. This was neither.

It’s all lumpy gravel surfaces but there is plenty of green grass between the sites to keep it cool and not too parking lot-ish. It’s a little hard to walk on but it drains well. There are no frills other than a cleared walking path through the field.   FHU sites; no problems with the utilities. 

There were only a few other RVs there when we stayed in April, which made us feel just the slightest bit exposed and leery about leaving the RV for a day trip. But nothing happened and there were no strange people hanging around, which happens at private parks sometimes. Probably just my normal paranoia—ignore it.  Some of the RVs were older and appeared to be seasonal, but not junky.  The grounds were very clean.  The manager on site and the person who took my reservation were both very nice.

If you use google maps to navigate to it, be aware that google takes you to Dinosaur World which is in front of the park and does NOT connect to the entrance. Stay on Route 70 a little bit farther west until you see the sign for the park, then you take a left turn into the entrance.

The Watermill Restaurant across the street does an okay breakfast buffet with great biscuits and cooked apples. The eggs are horrible and the coffee kind of blah.

Mammoth Goes Birding…and stuff, Day 4

Friday April 11

Fairly short (3 hour 45 minute)  and somewhat bad drive--light showers and traffic horrible--to Cave City, where we located with some difficulty Dino Valley RV Park. Google took us to the parking lot in front of the RV park, but that was not anywhere near the entrance. It was probably the closest you could get, walking. But not a driving option.

It only took a minute or two of quiet zooming on the phone in satellite mode and a quick walk out to the street to see where the entrance was.

I’m not sure how to review this place. It’s very much “no frills”, but that’s not a problem for us. It’s a big graveled area, not very level, with lots of RV hookups. No trees or picnic tables or any sort of amenities and the gravel is a little uncomfortable to walk on, but there are points—(a) there are trees around the edges to scan for birds, (b) lots of grassy areas in and around the gravel sites, (c) water/sewer/electric hookups, and (d) not very many campers!  There are maybe five campers that seem to be semi-permanent occupants, but they are mixed in with all of the empty sites instead of tucked off to one area as you would expect.

It's right off interstate 65 which is both good for access but bad for noise. But not so much noise really.

If I had to speculate, I’d say this place is relatively new and they just haven’t finished with all the frills yet. There’s a walking trail marked along two sides—very smooth although just mowed grass. But it worked for us very nicely—it took about 20 minutes to completely circle the campground.

Unfortunately, the cool front appears to have succeeded in coming through and the temperature has dropped from the low eighties to the low sixties, with a light frost expected overnight. Very chilly to me. But Molly wants a walk now.

Our evening walk was unpleasant—a loose dog kept trying to come up to us. I thought it was a coyote at first, but it responded to a no-nonsense “no”. In the morning I realized it was a shepherd mix, like Molly, with tags. It appeared to belong to one of the nearby long-term campers.

Mammoth Goes Birding…and stuff, Day 3

Thursday April 10

We tried to dawdle on leaving, but I was restless and didn’t have a dawdle in me. And there was a chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. So, even though it was only a 2-1/2 hour drive and check-in time wasn’t until 4pm, we packed up and left by about 10:15, for our short drive to Mousetail Landing State Park. (Don’t ask about the name—it’s a Civil War history thing and I’d just have to look it up.)

Mississippi River

 

The drive was a little bit challenging; not the Interstate, although it was very crowded and slow, but the little bitty Tennessee roads to get from the Interstate to the campground. I rerouted from google’s “suggestion” to take US-641 south and then take US-412 east. Google had us getting off the interstate at least fifteen miles further west and then taking US-412 for a lot longer, but I’m glad I didn’t. I had good memories of 641 from my college days—wasn’t that the road that went from Paducah to Murray?  And it turned out to be multi-lane and pretty straight. But 412 was one of those narrow, windy two-lane Tennessee cowpaths and we were happy to get off it when we reached the exit onto the park road.

So of course we arrived a lot of hours before the 4pm check-in time. But that worked just fine—the lady at the visitor center checked and said that since there was no one in the spot the night before, we were fine to check-in and proceed to the campground.

Which was gorgeous!  All nicely maintained roads, hard gravel pads and decent utilities and brand-new picnic tables.  Not to mention big trees just coming into leaf, greenery all over but not swamp-ish in the least. Just a lovely hardwood forest.

 After getting set-up I had lunch and then coerced Ed into taking a walk on the trail. I wanted to go down to the river road and walk along the Tennessee, but it was closed. The road; not the river. But the trail we took went parallel to the river on a high ridge, and while challenging and a little bit rocky at points, it was mostly moss-covered and well-maintained. Lovely. 

 

 

 

 

 

And we were serenaded by a Prairie Warbler!!!  Cool beyond words and absolutely beautiful.

 I did not get a picture but I got a very good look at it and Merlin confirmed the song. Yeah!

New bird for me! 

(not my picture)

Mammoth Goes Birding…and stuff, Day 2

Wednesday April 9

Sunny and warmer. A little windy. Passed about 20 RVs, 1 roadside hawk

Today was an exciting—and short—drive through Little Rock to West Memphis, where we stopped at the KOA on I-55 a little bit north of I-40. It was over half empty when we arrived at 2:30 or so, but filled up at the end of the day, so it must be a good spot for overnighters like us.  It turned out to work very well for us, and would have worked better if the dog playground hadn’t been flooded recently and was too muddy to be usable.

 

But, as is usual with private campgrounds, there was no place to take a really long dog walk or go for a jog. We tried to to the road out front, but it was the feeder to the Interstate and had no shoulders and was too scary. So we just walked round and round the campground. Not pleasant. 

There were big cottonwood trees around the campground, but outside that just flat and muddy farm land. There were small flocks of very noisy geese going over but that’s about all in the birding arena. I expect the migrating songbirds stick to the tall trees in Crowley’s Ridge, about 30 miles west of where we were.  We’ve camped there but not during migration.

But it was convenient and next day will be better. I forgot to explain at the beginning that my original plans for this trip had been cratered three times already, with a fourth time to come. My original destination for the day was Tom Sawyer’s RV Park on the Mississippi River.  But they’d called me a week earlier to cancel—flooding had the campground closed. My stop for the following day was supposed to have been Lock A Campground in Tennessee near Nashville. It had been cancelled due to flooding and storm damage all over the centers of Tennessee and Kentucky. Luckily, I found a state park in Tennessee that was okay and rebooked before we set out. And my stop for the day after that was the renowned Nolin Lake State Park in Kentucky. Guess what?

The fourth cancellation happened on the return trip, in Oklahoma. Our campsite was under water.  A nice lady from the COE called me and said if I wanted to change she could find me another site, but I chose to take a shorter route and just let her cancel it.

dog park

REVIEW: Memphis KOA Journey

Decent overnight or two-day at I-40/I-55 junction

Typical KOA on a flat prairie field with big cottonwoods, but so immaculately kept up it could be called charming. They’d had flooding a few days earlier, so there was a good bit of mud spotting left on the grass, but I can’t blame them for that. It would be all clean and lovely again in a day or two.

It was half empty when we arrived at 2:30 or so, but did fill up very much at end of day. Quietly, of course, for a mid-week in April. The highway noise is pretty much constant but not overwhelmingly loud. It’s the price you pay for convenience.

We got one of the midpriced pull-thru sites, and it was plenty long for our 35’ MH and toad without unhooking. The sites were closely set side by side, of course—that’s almost the rule with KOAs.  They did tack on a $5 pet fee, which I found a little disconcerting. I’d never experienced that before at a KOA. Plus, we couldn’t use the doggie playground due to mud left over from the flooding.  But they did have a couple of pet walking areas with doggy bags—did our $5 pay for doggie bags?

 They also had a pretty nice pool (9’ at one end); a playground; dinner and breakfast sales (dinner by pre-order, breakfast in the diner); store and laundry. We didn’t use any of these features, though.  And the checkin people were very nice.