We have a Campground Reviews section on our website, but I thought I’d share our Top 10 Favorite Campgrounds and why we feel that way, and see how they compare to yours.

1. Elkhart Campground, Elkhart, Indiana – Every year when we pull into Elkhart Campground, we feel like we have arrived back home. We know most of the regulars and see many people we know passing through every year. The campground is huge, and our regular site has 50 amp electric and water, and we usually don’t have anyone parked on top of us. Owners Bob and Gita Patel have become very good friends, and they have allowed us to work on several upgrade projects on the bus while we have stayed there.

2. Sumter Oaks, Bushnell, Florida – We always get a friendly welcome at this Escapee park, we love the huge live oak trees that shade the park, as well as the indoor pool and opportunity to see so many of our Escapee friends.

3. Rainbow Plantation, Summerdale, Alabama – This is another favorite Escapee park with us. The sites are huge, there is a lot to see and do on and around the Gulf Coast, and we enjoy the laid back feel of the area.

4. Tra-Tel RV Park, Tucson, Arizona – There is nothing fancy about Tra-Tel, the spaces are a bit tight, but we usually spend a month there every year. Everybody is very friendly, they always make us feel welcome, and we have family in Tucson we enjoy visiting.

5. Country Roads RV Park, Lake Delton, Wisconsin – Owners Terry and Terri Michael are good friends of ours and whenever we visit their campground we feel like we are part of the family. The park is very clean and has every amenity we could ever want or need.

6. Thousand Trails Colorado River Preserve, Columbus, Texas – This membership park has over 125 full and partial hookup sites, an activity center, pool, hot tub, and lots of wide open spaces. A huge herd of deer live here also and are frequent visitors to the campsites. We spend a lot of time just enjoying the wildlife.

7. Thousand Trails Verde Valley Preserve, Camp Verde, Arizona – This membership campground has 265 full hookup sites, beautiful views, and is convenient to everything in central Arizona. Since the campground sits down in a bowl, we are glad we have our Wilson Trucker antenna and booster to get good air card coverage there.

8. Toad Suck Ferry Corps of Engineers Campground, Conway, Arkansas – Don’t let the name fool you, this is a wonderful campground located right on the Arkansas River. From our site we watched riverboats push barges through the lock and dam.  Our site had 50 amp electric & water, a central dump station, and did I mention the great views?

9. Ray Behrens Corps of Engineers Campground, Monroe City, Missouri - We have never been to a Corps of Engineers campground we have not liked, but this is a favorite. Huge spaces, some with full hookups, very clean, and it is situated on Mark Twain Lake.  The only drawback was very slow air card service.  

10. Turkey Creek RV Village, Hollister, Missouri - This Escapees Club RV park is our favorite place to stay when visiting Branson. The park has 68 full hookup sites, clean rest rooms, a laundry, club house, and a beautiful setting on Lake Taneycomo. Turkey Creek is just minutes from all the attractions of Branson, yet laid back and peaceful.

So there we are, our own Top 10. What about you? What are some of your favorite campgrounds, and why?

Thought For The Day – Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.

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Miss Terry is still feeling pretty bad, so I wasn’t sure if she was up to traveling yesterday. But when we woke up she said that maybe her problem is not a cold, but rather allergies, and she wanted to get out of the area to see if that made any difference.

So we left Ray Behrens Corps of Engineers Campground about 9:30 a.m., drove north a few miles to U.S. Highway 36 and took it east to Hannibal. We crossed the Mississippi River and the road became Interstate 72 on the Illinois side of the river.

The weather had predicted scattered thunderstorms, and we had a few sprinkles as we were leaving Missouri, but they soon disappeared. Traffic was light and the bus was running good, so it was a great day for traveling.

We had talked about stopping in Springfield, Illinois to see the Abraham Lincoln Home National Historic Site, but Terry was feeling so bad that about an hour into our trip she went back to the bedroom and laid down. She was still asleep when we reached Springfield and I didn’t want to wake her, so I just kept driving. Terry woke up about 160 miles down the highway, as we were passing by Rantoul, Illinois on Interstate 57.

We try to avoid driving anywhere near Chicago whenever we can, so at Gilman, Illinois we took U.S. Highway 24 east into Indiana and turned north again on U.S. Highway 41 and followed it until we came to U.S. 30, drove east again for ten miles, then got onto Interstate 65. It was a short jog north again to Interstate 80, and we followed it all the way to Elkhart.

Except for one short stop for a late lunch/early dinner at one of the service plazas on the Indiana Toll Road, we just kept on rolling, putting about 450 miles behind us. This is more than most RVers like to travel in a day, but sometimes we get out there on the open road and the miles just keep going by effortlessly.

It is always nice to pull into Elkhart Campground, which feels like home to us because we have been coming here so many years. We know all of the regular visitors here, and got lots of waves as we drove past. As soon as I stopped the bus in front of our regular site several fellows came by to say hello.

It always takes a while to get the bus set up when we arrive at a new location, and I told Terry to just let it go until she got to feeling better, but she likes things in order, so she insisted on getting organized while I hooked up our utilities.

After more than a week of very slow National Access service on our Verizon air card, it’s great to have four full bars of EVDO high speed internet again. We’ll be here for much of the summer, with some trips out to visit family members in Michigan, and maybe to a few RV rallies in the region. It’s good to be home again.

Thought For The Day – When you were born, you were crying and everyone around you was smiling. Live your life so that when you die, you’re the one who is smiling and everyone around you is crying.

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We spent part of yesterday visiting with Smokey and Pam Ridgely at Mark Twain Landing, which has an RV park and a huge water park. Smokey and Pam are workamping there this summer, and we wanted to see them before we left the area.

Bob and Molly Pinner had moved to Mark Twain Landing from the Corps of Engineers campground, and we ran into them at the RV park’s restaurant, where we joined them for lunch.

Paul, the restaurant’s cook, really knows how to turn out some great food, and our waitress, Tracy Grove, was an absolute delight. She is pretty, funny, and kept us laughing during our meal.

After lunch, Smokey gave us a behind the scenes tour of the water park. It has several pools, including a 500,000 gallon wave pool that uses huge fans to create waves that would be great for body surfing. There are also water slides, a “river” for floating on tubes, and wading pools for the little ones. Not to mention a lot of very pretty young ladies in bikinis. I’m not sure how much they are paying Smokey to hang out at the pool all day, but I suspect he’d actually pay the park instead, based upon some of the “scenery” around the pool.

Driving back to our campground, I realized that I had I goofed. When we arrived at Ray Behrens Corps of Engineers Campground we paid for a week, and for some reason I had it in my mind that we were due to leave today. It was not until I happened to glance at the tag hanging on the rear view mirror of our van that I realized that we were actually supposed to leave on Friday! Oops! A classic example of cranial-rectal inversion on my part.

Checkout time is 4 p.m., and it was about 3 p.m. when I realized my mistake, so we stopped at the ranger station and asked if we could pay for an extra night. The volunteer on duty said no problem, we were in a non-reservable site, so nobody was waiting for us to leave so they could come in.

Later in the afternoon we drove to the campground at Mark Twain Lake to visit with Ron and Brenda Speidel, who are camp hosting there for the month of June. They had a steady stream of campers coming in to register, and others stopping by to buy firewood.

Ron and Brenda enjoy volunteering at state parks, and it’s a pretty good gig. The work is easy, the hours are flexible, and they get a full hookup site in exchange for their work. So they get a month’s free camping in exchange for a few hours of light work every week registering campers. They don’t clean the restrooms or mow any grass, just check campers in, sell firewood, and answer questions. They said the park is busy on the weekends, but Monday through Thursday, they pretty much have the place to themselves.

With budgets cuts everywhere, state parks, Corps of Engineers campgrounds, and other facilities nationwide are always in need of help. If you are interested in learning more about volunteering, Ron and Brenda will be presenting an excellent seminar on it at our Eastern Gypsy Gathering rally in Celina, Ohio September 28 – October 2. Make your plans to attend.

Thought For The Day – Having a child fall asleep in your arms is one of the most peaceful feelings in the world.

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Several people have been confused by when I post the blog, because now that we are in the Midwest, it appears online before midnight out west, with the next day’s date on it. This has come up before, so hopefully I can explain it.

I try to post the blog as close to midnight as I can local time, wherever we happen to be. That means that when we were in Arizona it went online about midnight Mountain time, or 3 a.m. Eastern time. I do the same thing here in Missouri, which means that it goes online about 9 p.m. in California, but with the next day’s date on it. A couple of readers have complained about that.

What can I say? I’m a night owl and do most of my writing at night. I’m too lazy to get up at the crack of dawn to post the blog in time to please the early birds, so I do it the night before.

This area around Mark Twain Lake has a multitude of geocaches just waiting to be found. Yesterday we hunted up a couple of virtual caches, including the neat old Union Covered Bridge, located a few miles from Paris, Missouri. We love covered bridges, but this old timer, built in 1871 and restored in 1967, is in pretty sad shape. There are holes in the sides and it has been closed to vehicle traffic since an overloaded truck broke a supporting beam in 1970. There are only four covered bridges left in Missouri, so I hope they save this wonderful old structure before it is too late.   

I have good news for wannabe RVers looking for ways to make money as they travel! Workamper News, the magazine devoted to helping RVers find jobs, has launched their new Workamper Dreamers Blog to help you make your dreams come true. The blog is aimed at helping you understand the workamping lifestyle and what to expect when you get out here and start looking for jobs that will fit into your mobile lifestyle. Check out the new blog, I think you’ll be impressed.

This is our last day at Ray Behrens Corps of Engineers Campground, and we will spend it touching base with our friends Smokey and Pam Ridgely and Ron and Brenda Speidel, who are working locally. Then it’s time to fire up our old bus and hit the road once again. We have to be in Goshen, Indiana late next week for the Heartland Owners Rally, and we want to get settled in at Elkhart Campground and have time to unwind before that starts.

Except for the poor Verizon cell phone service and the slow National Access air card signal, we really like it here, and we know this is one place we’ll return to again in our travels.

Thought For The Day – Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it.

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We spent Saturday relaxing at Ray Behrens Corps of Engineers Campground. At least I did. Poor Miss Terry had several loads of laundry to catch up on, as well as cleaning up all of the mud and dirt tracked in during the Escapade at Sedalia.

I had a backlog of e-mail to catch up on, and worked my way through that, then entered some new subscriptions that had come in during the rally. We have very poor Verizon service on our cell phones and air card, only 1X Extended Network instead of the much faster EVDO service we get in most places.

We can get online and make calls, but we have to be patient to do so. I did a speed test, and our download speed is only 66 kbs, while upload is 28 kbs. That’s a little better then the dismal service we had in Kingman, Arizona back in March, but nowhere near the 1500 to 2200 kbs we had in Apache Junction and other places around the country.

If you have not been to a Corps of Engineers campground before, you have no idea what you are missing. They are some of the best values in the RV world. Our site at Ray Behrens Campground on Mark Twain Lake is typical of the other Corps parks we have visited, with the added plus of a full hookup site, which not all Corps campgrounds have. But every one we have visited has had huge sites, is super clean, and at a great price.

As these photos I took yesterday show, there is room for any size RV. With our 40 foot MCI bus conversion and extended length Ford cargo van in our paved site, we could still park another full size car or truck. We have neighbors in everything from tents to fifth wheel trailers, and lots of room between the sites so we don’t feel cramped. The restrooms are clean and the grass is carefully trimmed.

Yesterday, longtime Gypsy Journal readers Joy and Phil Brown stopped by to visit. They are in the area doing genealogical research, which is one of Joy’s passions, and it was nice to see them. Be sure to check out their Backroad Chronicles blog.

Also yesterday, our friends Bob and Molly Pinner pulled into the site across from us in their beautiful Monaco Dynasty motorhome, and we had a nice visit with them. Bob and Molly are a wonderful couple we have enjoyed meeting up with at our Gypsy Gathering rallies and other RV events across the country. Bob and Molly share their traveling adventures in their excellent Moon River And We blog.

Speaking of Gypsy Gathering rallies, several people have been asking me if Chris and Jim Guld of Geeks on Tour would be putting on their Computer Boot Camp at our Ohio Gypsy Gathering rally in September. I have confirmed with Chris that they are going to hold the Boot Camp, so visit their website or send them an e-mail for more details.

At last year’s rally the Boot Camp was so successful that they repeated it a second time. Miss Terry participated in the second session the Boot Camp, at the end of the rally, and learned a tremendous amount about how to get the most out of her computer.

Thought For The Day – The aging process could be slowed down dramatically if it had to work its way through Congress.

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