Harrison Bay and Defeated Creek Campgrounds

I am writing this entry from the ranch in Missouri. We arrived here on Monday, April 2. Since we have been here it has been the typical busy schedule. We love to spend time with the grandkids, but we do miss our very relaxed lifestyle on the road. I have to get these last three entries done for the blog or I will forget what we did, so let's go back about three weeks to leaving the Smokey Mountains.

We left Ft. Wilderness campground on March 20. We had a very interesting drive down the gorge of the Nantahala river. There were many white water rafting outfitters along the road. The river was beautiful. We should have taken some pictures, but there were not any great places to stop with the rig. The driving was slow, so the 130 mile day seemed long. We stopped at Harrison Bay State Park, just north of Chattanooga, Tennessee. That was the first Tennessee State park we have stayed in. We had a nice site, but we just stayed two days and it rained most of that time. Here is a shot of our site:

 
I took a couple of short walks, but that was it for activity. We are starting to see signs of spring. The red buds in this park were blooming.

We left Harrison Bay on March 22 and headed north. Yep, North! We decided that we wanted to head to Kentucky to see Mammoth Cave National Park, so that meant going almost due north. We drove up out of the Tennessee River Valley. There were some steep, but fairly short grades. It was a pretty and interesting drive.

We drove about 150 miles to Defeated Creek Campground. They had plenty of room in this very large COE campground. We scored a nice site right on the lake.

We both took many walks around this beautiful park. I got a number of bird shots, but I will spare you most of those. The park was almost empty when we arrived, but got pretty full as we headed into the weekend. We stayed 4 nights and just enjoyed the beautiful park. We did have one spectacular sunset.

I also caught this Blue Heron fishing behind our rig one evening.

Well that was about it for our two stops along the road. We love campgrounds with lakes. We always talk about how we would like to go explore the lake by boat. I have been doing a bunch of research on how to make that possible. I had been thinking mostly about a powerboat, but on this trip we shifted that thinking to sailboats. The only problem is neither one of us know how to sail. It is our plan to explore sailing as we move forward. More about that in future entries, but next we need to remember Mammoth Cave National Park. I will write about that visit in my next entry.