Red River Gorge & Natural Bridge
Red River Gorge
The drive to our Kentucky campground during the first week of October was stunning! The leaves had just started to change and a cool, crisp breeze was in the air.
The next day we hopped in the car and took a ride into the Red River Gorge to take a look at the changing autumn leaves.
We only did a short 1/4 mile hike this day as we were feeling a little off at this point. It was the low energy that we noticed first, but we chocked it up to having a quick moving week the week before with two campgrounds and visiting the Ark the day before.
We saw this beautiful arch on our hike and walked across the top and under it. Red River Gorge is known for its many stone archways.
This is when we crossed the top of the arch. There aren’t any handrails or guards, but don’t get close to the edge because it’s a long way down from here.
We headed back to the car and stopped at a few locations to take some pictures along the roadway.
This early fall scenery was just what we had been looking for after seeing the beginnings of fall in the UP of Michigan, but then leaving it before it had a chance to peak.
The next day is when it bit us, each of us came down one at a time with a sore throat, fatigue, and flu like symptoms. We were out for most of the week tending to the flu that we likely picked up at the Ark as that was the only place we were all together that week.
Natural Bridge
Near the end of the week, I was mostly recovered from the illness, or so I thought.
We had been cooped up inside all week, missing the beautiful fall leaves and wanted to get out to see more of Kentucky before we had to leave the next day, so I set off to do a small 2 mile hike to see Natural Bridge. This is another rock archway that you can walk across, go under, and see from afar.
The trail is over somewhat rugged terrain, in between tall trees in the thick of the woods. There were many more people hiking it than the other, shorter arch hike, but because I didn’t know what I would see on the hike, I took my camera bag and the drone. Kentucky has very lax laws in regards to drone flying, so I figured I’d give it a try on top of one of the mountains.
The sun was getting low in the sky and golden hour was at its height. Perfect!
Well, I ended up finding a secluded spot by Lovers Leap where I wouldn’t hit anyone if I crashed the drone, since I’m still learning how to control it. The scenery is just amazing around here at this time of year.
The hike, however, was grueling, probably because I wasn’t quite as recovered as I had thought. That 2 mile hike took a lot out of me and I was glad to finally be at the top of it. The only hike I had left was another half mile down hill. That wouldn’t be so bad, right?
Wrong!
Considering how far I had climbed in 2 miles, the half mile down was nearly straight down a bunch of steep staircases where side stepping was necessary to make sure you don’t go flying forward into an unending tumble to your eventual death at the bottom. Yeah, that was fun!
Natural Bridge Campground
I haven’t had many campgrounds that I can say that I’d never stay at again, but this was absolutely one of them. Where do I start?
The road into the campground is a one level road with blind corners, so if another rig is coming, one of you has to back up or cars have to move to the side. Once you reach the turn to enter the campground, you are met with a very tight turn over an 11 ton max. bridge. (We are just under 13 tons!) It was either go on or back out along the narrow one lane road. I went to talk to the owner at the manager’s office and he told me he’s had 20 ton rigs go over that bridge no problem and ones that were even longer than us. I made the decision to try it, but it was tight and I didn’t linger.
Once we were in, the site was easily found, but it was very, very difficult for our 40′ fifth wheel to make the tight turn onto the narrow, gravel pad. We had to ask our neighbor to move their car several times as we tried a driver’s side turn first, then turned it around to try a blind side turn. Cutting over the grass we eventually made it into our spot, but no room to straighten out, which is why we were half on and half off the pad. We are fulltime RVers and have been to 100 campgrounds, literally. If we wouldn’t have been on the end, I seriously doubt we could have made it into the site.
We hooked up to shore power and set up, but we immediately got a low voltage error and it kept shutting off the surge suppressor. Since it was late, we had to run our generator for the remainder of the night until quiet hours to have enough power to make it to morning. We reported it in the morning and they apologized and changed out the breaker and GFCI plug and it seem to fix the problem. After that, we continued to get a buzzing sound to our computer’s power supply and fireplace (two high powered devices).
The water was fine, but the dump was difficult to access with our rig. In fact we determined that there was no way we could get it down there without having to back up a muddy gravel area, just to get it close enough to dump. Bad design, unfortunately. Instead of going through that, we used the tote take to make a couple runs and dump all our tanks before leaving and getting as light as we could before crossing the 11 ton bridge again.
Starlink was sketchy in this location and we had only 1 bar on Verizon on the phone. With AT&T and Verizon through the cell antenna on the roof, we were able to get 4 bars, but it constantly dropped out.
The good part of this place was that the people running the campground were nice and tried to help out as they could. It sounded like they were aware of the problems, and had a plan to work on them, but as of this time, I would not recommend this campground for larger rigs, probably nothing over 25-30′.