We pulled out of our site at the boat ramp in White, Georgia at 11:01 am on Wednesday, September 30th and drove almost 4-hours to Panther Creek State Park in Morristown, Tennessee for a 2-night stay.
It took about an hour or so for me to get used to driving while pulling a trailer again. Almost felt like when we first started 5 years ago, but not quite. However after a while I began to get back into the groove.
Panther Creek State Park
Panther Creek State Park is comprised of 1,444 acres of land for public recreation and wildlife habitat. It sits on the banks of Cherokee Lake, which was created by the Cherokee Dam that was built on the Holston River. Construction of the dam was completed two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Panther Creek State Park was established in 1967.
The campground has 50 sites for tents and RVs with 20-30-50 amp electrical hookups and water. Eight of the sites have sewer connections. There are two very nice buildings with clean, spacious restrooms and showers with hot water. We decided to make use of their showers and enjoyed the hot water and the great water pressure.
There are many trails in the vicinity of the campground (we hiked one while we were there), as well as a camp store and a dump station. If you drive farther down the peninsula you come to the overlook area, which we also enjoyed. They have a large playground area near the campground and Cindy said they were constructing a pool which was even farther away. I’m sure the campers appreciate not having the noisy playground and pool nearby, lol.
We arrived at our site (49) around 3:15 pm and were set up by 4:15, which wasn’t bad considering this was another area we were having to “get back into the groove of doing” but as long as we kept double-checking each other (mostly Cindy double-checking me) we did ok.
Site 49 was the last in the middle section of the oval and we had a large, open space of grass to one side of us and a nice amount of space between our site and the one next to us. There were no trees, so Starlink had plenty of wide-open blue sky to work with and no obstructions to our signal.
We ate dinner, watched the news, Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Daily Show and one episode of Fringe. Then it was off to bed because I was not used to driving 4 hours while pulling the trailer, so I was tired.
Thursday morning I slept in a bit. Cindy hiked a mile by herself before I even rolled out of bed and was happy to see several deer before returning to make us breakfast. After breakfast we chose a trail and hiked about 2 miles down to the shoreline of Cherokee Lake and back.
We had an important call scheduled for Friday (which was our travel day) and it would be after our check-out time, so we drove into town and checked along the route we would be taking to see a spot where we could pull into with the trailer that would also have a good cell signal. We found one about 15 minutes away, fueled up Voyager (it’s much easier to do without Nomad) and returned to the campground.
We decided to drive down to the day use area which was at the point of the peninsula. There was a beautiful overlook area that provided a gorgeous view of this part of Cherokee Lake.
Then it was back to our site for lunch and, since I was still a bit tired, a short nap in the recliner.
After dinner and a couple of our usual shows, we spent the rest of the evening coordinating with our kids (Ann for our visit with her the following week; Jeremy/Wendy for their visit to Orlando the week of Thanksgiving and Amber/Abby for our time in Orlando) working out details of each visit. Like most parents/grandparents, we look forward to seeing our kids/grandkids whenever we have the opportunity.
Friday morning we enjoyed a delicious breakfast, then packed up to head for our next stop, which is in southern Virginia.
You know it’s State Motto: Virginia Is For Lovers!
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