June 15, 2010 Day 55 Jellystone to the Canyon in the Clouds

Well Lady CurbCrusher tired of writing every day, and we’re only a couple of days from home. So it looks like I’ll have to take over the day to day blog for the last couple of days of the trip. We’re still on a limited bandwidth wi-fi, so no pictures until we get back home.

We woke up in Jellystone Mammoth Cave, not only the worst RV parking (yes even worse than the Walmart parking lot back in Winslow) on this trip, but the most over-priced and overrated also. Imagine if you’re going to build an RV park, so you find a nice steep hill. Then when placing the RV sites you have a choice, you could put them parallel to slope of the hill, so that one side would be up and the other low, or you could put them perpendicular to the slope of the hill so that the front would be lower than the back. Or, you do what the Jellystone people did and put them on about a 45 degree angle to the slope of the hill so that there is no way in Hades that anyone will be able to level their RV. Then you have a choice where to put the sewer outlet, you could put it on the downhill side, since stuff flows downhill, or like our site geniuses at Jellystone have done you put it on the uphill side. The site was so unlevel, that even after moving the RV around on the site, we could not dump gray water from the tank, because the site tilted the motorhome away from the dump valve. I guess this is what happens when you let a cartoon bear design an RV park. All in all I was terribly disappointed in Jellystone. I’ve seen Jellystone campgrounds next to the roads I’ve traveled on for a long time, and always thought the concept was a great one, leveraging the most famous cartoon bear and his cartoon National Park with a campground. So I was really happy to be staying in a Jellystone campground, even a the premium price that Jellystone Mammoth Cave charged. As noted the sites were awful, there is no other way to describe it, and the atmosphere and environment were not much better. The campground was dirty, the sites close together. Our advice to you echos what we kept hearing in Yosemite and Yellowstone on this trip: STAY AWAY FROM THE BEARS. Yogi just can’t pull off a campground.

Once we got out of the campground, we headed south on I-65. We recovered some ground, the 35 miles from Bowling Green to Cave City, and then headed out of the state of Kentucky. We looped around Nashville on TN-155 and changed over to I-24 headed toward Chattanooga. Somewhere along the way we stopped to fill up and eat lunch. There are some hills to climb in this area, but I pulled up the elevation on the GPS and it seems that highest we got was about 2000 feet. Of course that’s nothing now that we’ve crossed the Big Horns at 9666 feet and the Continental Divide a couple of times at 8000+ feet. Just outside of Chattanooga, we headed south on I-59 for a few miles. We exited at Trenton and headed up GA-136 to the Cloudland Canyon State Park. We visited this park back in September of 2007, enjoyed our stay here and thought this would be a good last stop for our GART.

So here we are a little over 6000 miles and some 55 days into our Great American Road Trip. We’re about 600 miles from home and haven’t decided if that’s a one or a two day trip. When we leave Thursday morning we may very well get about six hours into the trip and decide that it’s time go ahead and get home, or we may just stretch it out one more night. We are one day ahead of our original schedule.

This entry was posted on June 16, 2010 at 3:01 pm and is filed under GART, RV Stuff, Travel Review, Campground Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.