Selecting an RV Site

We have stopped for a few days at a Thousand Trails park in southeastern Indiana, near Batesville, between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, Ohio. It is a huge park - somewhere I read that there are 800 sites, but I think a lot of the sites are for permanent site-holders.

Thousand Trails parks are unique in that you can make a reservation, but there is not a specific site reserved for your use. So, they know that we are arriving on a specific day, have a 40' long motorhome and a towed vehicle (the Jeep), but it is possible that, if other campers with smaller rigs have taken all the large sites before we arrive, that we may not find a site that we actually can fit into.

We knew that arriving on Saturday was not a great idea, but, that's the day that it worked out for us to arrive. I had called before driving all the way here because there were a couple of casinos that allow RVers to park for free in their lots that were not too far out of the way. The ranger I talked with said that we probably wouldn't get exactly the kind of site that we might want (ideally we want to have 50A electric with water and sewer), but that they would definitely have a site that we could fit in. We would at least have 30A electric, and with that, we could run one air conditioner at a time, and we figured that was better than boondocking at a casino and having to run the generator to have air conditioning.

When we arrived Saturday just before 7pm, the ranger was very apologetic, saying that we would not find a very good site, but that a lot of folks would be leaving on Sunday and we could move to a better site. I assured her that we understood and it wasn't a problem. She had checked with another ranger and knew that our best chance to find a site would be in Phase 2, so she gave us directions to get there, suggesting that we disconnect the Jeep and drive it around to find a site.

We did disconnect, and drove around a little - we couldn't exactly tell where there might be sites available in some cases, but we came across a pullthrough site at the end of a row, knew that we would fit it in (with the Jeep too) and decided that it was a good choice at least for the night, and probably okay for a couple of nights if we didn't find a site on Sunday.

There was a reason why the site was available...

It was pretty wet and muddy on both sides of the exit of the pullthrough...

We parked Gracie so her steps were out on the patio, and were careful getting in/out of the Jeep to avoid the mud.

But Carl made an interesting observation... if the site had not had the mud, it most likely would not have been available for us arriving late on a Saturday.

It made us think: we wouldn't have each other if we hadn't gone through the "mud" of last year, the sorrow for each of us losing our beloved spouses. It wasn't a site that we would have chosen, it wasn't a part of life that we would have chosen, but, because of the challenges that we've gone through, we have the joy of being together.

So... there are learning experiences even in the selection of an RV site!