On Friday we departed from Reed Bingham State Park at 09:00AM EDT. We stopped for fuel at the Love’s Travel Stop in Jackson, GA. We stopped at this particular Love’s because they have an Amazon Locker to which we had shipped a replacement toilet valve (ours is leaking). We hit three traffic jams in Atlanta at the south end (18 minutes), downtown (10 minutes), and the north end (20 minutes). We stopped at a new RaceTrac in Emerson, GA to use the restroom. We topped off on fuel while we were there.
Traffic in Chattanooga was backed up starting at the I-24 exit all the way through to the western edge of town. We experienced another one hour delay. We reached the Marion County Park Campground in Jasper, TN at 5PM EDT.
We have a nice campsite (#53) but it’s not on the water. When I made the reservation, I was told up front that it was 30Amp (no 50Amp) with water. We had to lift the driver side of the camper 2″ to get level. When I connected the power I noticed a 50Amp breaker so I gave it a try, but it was dead. I hooked up to the 30Amp connection and started both air conditioners separately to avoid popping a breaker. The breaker at the pole never popped, but one further down the line did. I called the campground office and they said they would send out the electrician. He arrived in seconds (he and his family are camped beside us and his wife was working in the office). He reset the breaker down the way and hooked up an amp meter and monitored our current usage. With just our small AC we were at 20Amps (because the converter was also trying to charge the batteries). I think I could have gotten both AC’s running if I had shutoff the converter. This is the first place we’ve been that we couldn’t run both ACs on 30Amps. It took until about 9PM to drop the inside temperature from over 100 down into the 70’s. By midnight the bedroom and the living area were around 71 and we slept well. Unfortunately, while running on just one AC the next day the inside temperature reached 87 again when the outside temperature reached 98. The electrician had been out boating all day and we didn’t want to risk trying the second AC and popping the same breaker while he was gone. We also had water pressure issues starting around noon and finally let it slowly fill our water tank so we could disconnect from water and run off our pump (one less thing to disconnect when we leave Sunday).
We like this campground (particularly the view), but it has been a bit frustrating. The good news is that the half of the campground that we stayed in back in 2017 is completely shutdown for new electric and water (they aren’t allowed to add sewer). So they know they have issues and are trying to address them.
We originally tried the TV antenna and only picked up TBN (and several of its sub-channels). We were able to setup our Dish Network antenna (R2D2) for the first time this trip and pickup all three satellites (61.5, 110, and 119). We are getting between 5 and 30 Mbps download speeds with our AT&T 5G+ hot spot although its reception seems to cut in and out occasionally.
