Saturday May 15th 2021

Today’s started cool in the sixties and slowly climbed into the mid seventies. There was a little more wind out of the north than Friday, but overall it was a very nice day.

On my walk around the RV park this morning I discovered a multitude of ducks. The retention pond at the back of the campground has turned into a duck nursery of sorts. There were many big and small families of ducks swimming in the water and napping on the banks. The pictures in this blog entry are all of the ducks in the pond.

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I spent most of my day relaxing and working on travel plans for the summer. One thing I observed was the nightly prices seem to have gone up. The first places I check in a new area are the franchise campgrounds and the more heavily advertised places. Near tourist draws like Nashville some of these campgrounds want over one hundred dollars a night for sites that meet my RV configuration. Once I do a little more digging and find the less visible places that may be a little further away, the price comes down to a more reasonable number.

The other “gotcha” I’m seeing more is the campgrounds refusing to book a 30amp site to a class A motorhome. They are assuming that an RV built with 50amp service can’t survive on a 30amp site. Most of us know how to reduce our usage to avoid tripping a 30amp breaker. They use interesting excuses like “incompatible” or “fire danger”, but that’s what the breakers are there for. The reality is they want to make sure they fill the more expensive 50amp sites. It’s not the best idea plugging a 30amp RV into a 50amp line, but they’re willing to allow that practice. It could burn up the cord connecting the RV to the pedestal. It is reasonable to fill the 50amp sites with 50amp RVs before renting the 30amp sites to 50amp RVs. Just don’t get creative with the explanations.

My planning challenge continues to be finding places that I can stay longer near plenty of things to do. Weekends at popular tourist or recreational draws are already booked. The places that have weekend openings are designed for travelers and are usually near interstates further away from the things one would want to do. I know the longer I wait to book sites the worse it will get, but a lot of the longer stay issues have been around since I started looking at options in December and January. It’s not hopeless, just complicated.