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| Sunrise at Watsadler on Lake Hartwell |
Aaaah, now this is what it's all about! That was how we felt the three days we spent at Watsadler Campground on Lake Hartwell in northeastern Georgia. It wasn't all that much work to prep and load the camper, we have that down to a science. The only thing we forgot to bring was the soy sauce for one of Ilse's dishes. No problem there.
We had stayed overnight at Stephen C. Foster State Park near Fargo, Georgia, the first night out, and traveled north to Watkinsville the entire second day on U.S. 441, enjoying the oddly empty highway through the massive strands of Georgia slash pines, wiped out in certain areas by the forest fires of two years ago. Replanting has been finished, but it will be years before it all comes back.
We avoided the Interstate highways altogether, enjoying the vast expanse of mile after mile of empty asphalt. Once above Dublin, the road is mostly four lane, divided highway, up through the center of the state. We spent the Easter Vacation week with our daughter and her family near Watkinsville, just south of Athens, Georgia.
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| Flax Fields near Athens, Georgia |
The weather at first week was rainy and chilly, but it decided to cooperate just before we headed to the campground, and Spring sprung right before our eyes! It only took a week! Marvelous time to be in Georgia, a marvelous time to be at Watsadler, a really great campsite.
We spent the second day at Hartwell site-seeing, driving up the South Carolina side of the lake to see another Corps of Engineer campgrounds at the Springfield Campground before heading over to Anderson, South Carolina for lunch. The Springfield campground is larger than Hartwell, but is a seasonal campground.
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| Lake Hartwell, Georgia |
It opened on April 1st, the week before we got there. It appears to be as well laid out as Watsadler with only a few sites not directly on the lake, but it has a swimming beach which must be popular with the kids.
Go to http://www.recreation.gov/ for more details on Corp of Engineer campgrounds at Lake Hartwell.
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| 20 feet wide and 82 feet long, this house boat is en-route to Kentucky |
We kicked back, read books, walked the dogs, walked the dam, and took hundreds of photos of the dogwoods and azaleas that were in full bloom in the Hartwell area. We used our new hotspot to check e-mails, again proving that we really don't need to do that very often, and to keep an eye on the weather which threatened to turn stormy late Thursday, the day we were to check out and head south. No problem, we planned to be on the road early enough to miss most of the bad weather. For a video bicycle tour of Watsadler, click on
A Bicycle tour of Watdsadler Campground at Lake Hartwell, Georgia
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| Athens, Georgia. That's not smoke, it's pollen! |
We checked out reluctantly on Thursday morning and headed back toward Florida, having spent a great two weeks in Georgia. We made it even better by calling Monica, our daughter, and arranged to meet her and Claire, our granddaughter at a Publix supermarket parking lot in Watkinsville for lunch as we rolled back through once again, this time headed south.
We had a great lunch, then called ahead to Stephen Foster Folk Cultural Center State Park, the one in Florida near White Springs, to get the late arrival gate code in case we were delayed by the storm. No problem there, either, as the main entrance is manned until 8:00pm after April 1st. After a leisurely ride back down U.S. 441, we pulled in to the beautiful Florida park a little after 7:00pm, and within minutes were fixing dinner and once again checking e-mails.
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| Site 9 at Stephen Foster Folk Cultural Center State Park, nestled amid the giants!
NEXT - On the road again: Third time is a charm, at:  |
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