9/24/14 Travel day with a walk. Cloudland Canyon State Park, GA

We both had a much better nights sleep last night.  I was up at 7:30 and decided to change our travel plans.  Originally we were going to drive 41/2 hours today and stay at a campground on Hwy 75 for 1 night and then drive another 4 hours the next day.  We had talked about staying at Cloudland Canyon State Park in the North/West corner of Georgia yesterday but decided we wanted to go further towards Louisiana where we have a Rally to attend starting on 9/30.  Well this morning I changed my mind so I did some map questing and got our new directions printed out.  Now we only have 3 hours to drive.  When Jami got up around 8:30 I informed her of the changes and she was very happy about it.  She hates long driving days. 

We started getting everything packed up, I got the tanks emptied which was pretty easy since we have full hook ups here.  We were in no rush so it took us a little longer than normal, but still we were pulling out a 10:15am.  It was a boring trip as almost the entire trip was on freeway's, I-40 to I-75 to I-24 to I-54.  Once we exited the freeway it was 6 miles to the campground, but it was a windy road so I didn't get much over 35mph.  At one point I had to stop while going up a pretty steep grade because a semi had broken down in my lane and a tow truck was on site getting hooked up to tow it.  Luckily police were there directing traffic around.  That wasn't fun trying to get going again up that steep hill.

Once we arrived at the park I jumped into the Toyota with Jami and we scouted out the campground to find the site we wanted.  There are two campground, the East rim & the West rim.  East rim is fairly open, but the west rim is very wooded.  We chose Site #40 in the west rim.  This may be the only site in this section that a roof top satellite MIGHT be able to get signal.  The site would not be a great site if you pulled into it in the direction your supposed to, but we decided I would pull in facing the opposite way which put the water & electric hook ups on our door side.  But what a great campsite when you pull into it facing the wrong way.  We sent up the satellite and it did find a very week signal so I moved the camper forward 2 more feet and whala, we had great signal.  Now its the best site in the park :) 

We have all the privacy we could want.  And after the last few campgrounds we were sure ready for a place like this.  That's mainly the reason I made the change of plans to come here.  We got everything set up and being its been awhile since Jemma has gotten a long trail walk that's what the plan was.  This place has a few different trails and 2 water falls so we headed out to see one, maybe both of the falls.  The trails can be a little treacherous with all the tree roots and rocks which also makes it a much more difficult walk.  Glad I didn't were flip flops :)

 

 Small cave

 

Ya, that's the trail!

 Jemma crossing the walking bridge

 

 We decided to view the Hemlock Falls on this walk

 

 Stairs

 More stairs

 And more stairs

 What's this? Yep, more stairs.  And believe me there were ALOT more.

We were pooped after walking down & back up all those stairs that Jami could barely hold that rock up :)

 

We didn't get any pictures of the falls because you couldn't get a good camera shot from above it and we had enough stairs for today.  We'll try again tomorrow.  The total walk was 3.2 miles which felt more like 10 miles!  Jami made spaghetti for dinner when we got back, she makes awesome spaghetti! Delicious :)  Then we both got showers and watched some TV.  We had full intentions of have a campfire tonight, but we were felling a bit pooped so we will postpone that till tomorrow and went to bed.  AH, the peaceful sounds of the woods.  Which is mostly the sounds of crickets :)  Well sleep good tonight.