NC Mountains 2014 - Days 21 & 22

Day 21 - Thursday 8/28/14 We did our morning walk, had breakfast and departed for Doughton Park at 10AM. We drove North on the Parkway for about 80 miles and arrived about 12:30PM and set up in site 5 that we had reserved. It is a nice level shady site. We relaxed and read until it was time to cook supper. I grilled chicken on the Weber grill. By late evening most of the better sites in the RV loop that we were in were full. Some are to short for the modern Rvs. For future reference sites 5, 18, 19 & 20 would work for us and they can be reserved online. Site 8 would work but it can not reserved. After dark we were serenaded by lots of crickets and other creatures of the night.

Day 22 - Friday 8/29/14 We got up at 7AM and did our morning walk but had to wait until 8AM to start breakfast since we have to run the generator here to provide power to the appliances. We walked over to the tent loop and there were only 4 sites in use out of about of 100. This park, like all the other parks on the Blue Ridge Parkway and many other National Parks do not have bath houses so if you are not in a self-contained RV you have no place to take a shower. Therefore most of the park campgrounds are way underutilized. If the Park Service would put in bath houses the campgrounds would be used more and they could soon recoup the money.

After breakfast we decided to explore the area a little. We drove North on the parkway and took hwy 21 into Sparta to check out the town. We found a car wash on the way in and ran the car through it to get some of the road dust off. We stopped in town at a hardware store that sold the Lodge cast iron cookware like our Dutch Oven, then walked down the street to a retail outlet that sold crafts from local crafts people. The man that was running the store today was a fellow wood turner so we had a nice conversation. Then we walked across the street to a coffee shop to get a coffee and use their WiFi. When we left we drove some of the back road before going back to the campground. I cooked a rack of ribs in the Dutch Oven for supper and then built a campfire.