No, not any kind of storm in my life, but its raining out side and I really need to load and work on the camper.  And of course, this is the FIRST rainstorm I have seen since I moved here 5 yrs ago where the rain is constant and non-stop for the entire day.  Except of course when a hurricane comes through.  Its just a nice gentle rain, more than a drizzle, but not a pounding deluge.  According to the rain gauge its coming down at 0.2 inches an hour or less.  But its raining just hard enough Akela doesn’t want to go out unless I come with him.  And I haven’t gotten dressed yet, so he is out of luck. He better keep his legs crossed or his value will drop similarly to my stock market investments!  But we have been working on getting ready for a week long trip to Pennsylvania for an Aliner Rally and The Hershey RV Show.  I’ve been before, but this time they are inviting me to come as a media member and have access to the media only days and no charge.  So that is good.  I better do a good job!  My #1 son Kyle is going to drop down from Syracuse, NY and go with me. He is a help with carrying cameras and giving his opinion on campers and RV’s. 

Something I am doing this year is I have an Extensive form to fill out on every camper we look at so we grade and score them equally.  We are only going to look at smaller trailers, under 21ft, and mostly single axle.  The will need to have a Dry Bathroom and decent capacity grey and black tanks and larger fresh water tank.  Looking around dealer lots in the last few month preparing for the RV show I see a lot of models that are “Off Road” labeled.  Though I doubt any one is stupid enough to drag a $40K conventional  trailer “off Road”.  Well, maybe me, but I’m crazy.  So hopefully the show review video will be up by Oct 5th. It will require a lot of editing, as I suspect we will have 5-8 hours of video on 3 different cameras.  

But lets review some of the recent videos, drop a few details about what have already done, where we have been, and thing we saw we didn’t show you.   Our last video was the Russell Lake Recreation area.  We were looking for “Tourist” Attractions on Google maps in the area we were visiting friends.  Last year we found the “Guide Stones”, now destroyed, and determined we wanted to drive the “Antebellum Trail”.  The trail was long and arduous, not as great as I thought it should be.  But I would recommend visiting Athens, or Milledgeville to see some of their awesome old mansions.  But when you ask google to “FIND NEAR ME”  Tourist attractions, it does a lot of filtering of the map view so you only see certain things.  Sometimes it works out, sometimes its a bust.  Using GaiaGPS with the National Geographic Maps of the area are much better sources, but tedious and expensive.   So on Google I saw a “Fire Tower”,  so that sounds like a good hike, so that where we headed.  Not doing much research because whats to know about a Fire Tower.  Well, about this one, a lot!   It was very unique granite Fire Tower, preserved in an area that had developed into a very upscale neighborhood.  And it had been maintained as a park, preserved, but not climbable.   So instead of a hike, it was a drive to the tower. We walked around and it was good for Akela, he found several sticks.  But then we were done with visiting the tower and it was only 10am. 

Well, the Gas Buddy app told us there was cheap gas ($0.20 cheaper than anyone else) to the left and then a right.  So we did that and got gas, and across from the gas station I saw the “Russell Lake Recreation Area” sign.  Well hot dog!  That’s just what we wanted.  So we headed down the road, and it went down, down,  down, down.  And at a fork there was a sign for CAMPGROUND  and BOAT LAUNCH, so we kept on going down.  The campground was a nice primitive campground with no electricity or hookups, but it had a dump station and bathrooms with flush toilets and hot showers.  I only saw one HOST, but the place looked pretty well kept and the bath house was clean.  The “A loop” was down below the “B-loop”. The A-Loop was a little tighter with sites close to each other and seems to be in a area of potential flooding. But it was forested and flat and had just a few people in it.  The upper “B-loop” has about half its sites occupied on this weekend before Labor day weekend, and a lot of them had small boats or other recreational gear.   There were more “TENT ONLY” sites in B-loop, and many “RV sites” that were very un-level.  But there were really nice sites not in use and hopefully I captured that on the video.  In that area of Georgia/NC there are a lot of places to hike, bike, climb, fish, or shop within an hours drive.  We have been to many of them, but maybe we will get back to this hidden gem.  Since it is  mostly First Come First Served, it doesn’t show on Recreation.gov if you indicate you want a certain type of site.

The Video on the “North Carolina Highlands” and the “Van Hook Glade Campground“ were videos I was just winging it.   I had not had much time to plan the video, or research the area,  so we just packed up and went and tried to find stuff as we explored.  Fortunately, there is so much in that area to see and do, we had a great time and even had enough time to do a video for you.  The number of water falls is incredible.  And they are everywhere.  Check out any map of the area and it will point out 4-5, and a different map will point out 2-3 more.  Again, though, we went to try to climb a fire tower, and again it was a fail.  But getting there was fun and we did find the fun hike up White Side Mountain.  That was a nice hike we should have looked a the map for. The hike was a large loop on a nice trail with easier coming down the back side of the loop.  Well, we just went up the one side and found it pretty heavily fogged in and just came back the way we went up.  We did meet a bunch of people coming up, and some told us the trail looped around, but it was too late then.  We were halfway down.  I will bet if we had come down the other side, we would have been out of the fog and might have gotten better photos from the mountain top.  All the fog was coming up over the mountain, so the back side was probably clear.

But the area was very cool, and the actual town of Highland, NC was super interesting with all these little shops and food places.  I didn’t do any video in them because they were so crowded with people and I could not get a chance without people walking into the shot or avoiding the shot.  And I’m really not brave enough to just video people without them knowing and publish it. The campground was all I remember it.  And the recreation area around it was fun too. 

But I guess I will end this one here and maybe figure out if I want to discuss further back videos that I have not yet discussed.  Believe it or not I have a spread sheet with the interesting thing to put in the log that didn’t get into the final cut of the video.  You would not believe how anal I am about this channel thing!!    Anyways,  Stay Safe, Stay Healthy, and We’ll see you in a week or two.  Being that we will be at the RV Show Thursday  9/15, we might just post a few shorts instead of a 15 minute video.

Rick & Akela
GoingNoWhereFast

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