Settling in at Dale Hollow

Well, we finally arrived at Dale Hollow Lake Resort State Park on Wednesday. We checked with Bobbie at the gatehouse and went on in to our new home for the next three months, site Q1.

At first we were a little disappointed because we are in one of the three equine loops here. There are 18 loops, every loop has 8 RV sites, so there’s a total of 144 RV sites with 24 of those being equine sites.

It’s not that we dislike horses .. we enjoy them – not riding them of course, just watching them, talking to them, and given the opportunity, to pet them!

Ivan and Connie pulled into our loop .. they’re from Summer Shade, about an hour west of here toward Glasgow. They have a farm over there but like to come here a few times each summer and ride the trails with their other horse buddies. They’ve been enjoying the park for years.

Their son and daughter-in-law and their kids came in their motorhome so the family is having a good time horseback riding, bicycling, eating together, and telling stories around the campfire in the evening moonlight.

The reason that we were disappointed about being here in Loop Q with the horses is that there’s no wifi here and we sit in a low spot in the park with no cell service and no over-the-air TV reception. Argh!

But … For the Good News … Because it’s an equine area, there’s no playground, no swimming pool, no sand boxes, nothing for kids to do. When most families book sites in a campground, they try to get close to all the amenities and over here all we have is a nice new bath house/laundry within an easy walking distance from the back of our coach. Oh, and very few kids (Yay!)

The first day here we found out the a/c in the car doesn’t work. We asked Bobbie at the gatehouse if she knew a trustworthy mechanic in Burkesville (18 mile’s away) because she told us she lives there. She recommended “Daryl’s Place” up the road a piece.

I took the car up there and he put freon in the system and charged me $16 .. Happy Camper

We drove 18 miles the other way to Albany where I found a Blue Cellular store and bought a new SIM card for my phone (with a new number) so now my phone works here in the park and throughout the region. It’s a pay-as-you-go plan with no contract at $35 a month. So once again .. Happy Camper

Now that I have a phone that works here I could log on to Amazon and order a DISH receiver package. We’ve had DISH before but the outdoor antenna broke and we stopped using it once we were able to get unlimited data with Visible phone service and then we could stream all our TV and other web use with no data cap and no throttling. This is the first place in the country that we’ve found that Visible service doesn’t work. And my new $35/month phone is capped at 4 gig/month so we can’t use that for streaming or uploading pictures.

But in any event, Monday the DISH package should be here and then Kathy will be a Happy Camper!

We made a commitment to start walking regularly once we arrived. So far so good. The campground is a large irregular shaped loop with two rather large and steep hills. (Rough on the knees!)

The loop is just under 3500 steps or about 1.5 miles and we’ve managed (so far) to do that once in the morning and once.again in the evening. Wish us luck!

We’ve not started work yet. The park manager met us Wednesday when we arrive and told us to relax, find our way around, and she’d get with us on Monday, so my next post will be a little about what the job entails.