One of
the benefits of Hard Labor Creek State Park for us is that it is only 17
miles from our daughter and her family's home, near from
Watkinsville, Georgia.
It was
a pleasant, uneventful tow down from Richard Russell State Park near
Elberton, and took us only an hour and a half or so. We found we
won't be able to stay in any Georgia State Park over the Labor Day
weekend in our RV as every campsite site is already reserved! All the
campsites at Watsadler and the other U.S. Army Corps of Engineer
campgrounds are also booked! Only for the Labor Day Weekend, though,
then they are all practically empty! That doesn't help us, but we
have a week until we have to check out, so we decided to make the
most of it.
Site 26 at Hard Labor Creek state Park |
Checking
in at Hard Labor Creek State Park was a pleasant experience. Registering at all of
the Georgia State Parks we have stayed at in the past have been pleasant. The
volunteer at the registration desk was friendly, pleasant, and made a
suggestion that was worth its weight in gold: She said to turn on
our hot-spot as we drove through the campground looking for an
available campsite. The area is known for not having cell-phone
coverage or Wi-Fi, but, she said, there were several areas that had cell-phone coverage, it just wasn't universal for the entire
campground.
Taz meets a camp host piece of yard art |
OK,
hotspots are nothing more than cellphones that speak digital data
rather than voice. Each hot-spot has a cell phone telephone number
that connects it to the nearest cell-tower, just like your cell
phone, only it doesn't pass information in the audible range for the
human ear. Rather it translates the cell-tower stuff to
high-frequency data and looks for something digital to talk to, such
as your computer or tablet. It is an intermediate device – so is
your cell phone – but it can handle five devices if you are on a
3G network. If you are a high-speed 4G network, most hot-spots can
handle up to ten devices simultaneously. OK, this is getting deeper
than I wanted. Just understand a printer can not be added as the
functions of a hotspot are not the same as your router at home. Any
more information will cost you $125 dollars an hour.
Here
is the kicker: Our vaunted Verizon cellphones were dead as doornails
while our poor little Virgin/Sprint hotspot hummed away as long as the battery
would last! I'm posting this blog through our little Sprint/Virgin
hotspot, and will continue to check e-mails and the Internet every
chance we get. The
camping spot we picked not only has 3-bars – if you don't know what
that means, this whole blog is a moot exercise – and has privacy,
and plenty of room as we expect company during the week we are here.
So far
we are impressed with this relatively unknown Georgia State Park.
Clean, quiet, and well laid out with spotlessly clean facilities, we
simply should have made reservations earlier!
NEXT: The Dark Side of Camping, at:
http://sleepstwo.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-dark-side.html
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