Around Newport / Little Diamond Lake KOA Thousand Trails Campground

We've been walking around as well as biking around the Newport Thousand Trails (aka Newport / Little Diamond Lake KOA) Campground:

The "Fishing Lake"

There are paddle boats to rent - maybe kayaks and canoes too. But I am not sure that there are actually any personnel there to rent them to folks who want them...

The folded bikes packed into the back of the Jee-rage... we've managed to get a lot of the other stuff that used to be in the back into the Jeep in front of the bikes, or in other places in the motorhome for storage. You may notice that the Jeep is parked *very* close to the front of Gracie -- the site we are in is barely large enough for Gracie, so the Jeep is sticking out in the road... so we tried to park it as close as possible. The road in front of the site is pretty wide, so it isn't too much in the way...

Someone commented on Facebook about the e-bikes that there are some people who think you're not getting much exercising when riding e-bikes, but they don't take into account the additional exercise we get lifting and maneuvering to fold and store them!

On Tuesday on our e-bikes, we decided to take a path that was marked on the map as "Nature Walk" -- we were over in the KOA side of the campground and wondering if we could work our way back to the Thousand Trails side... it turned out to be successful, though we did not take any pictures when biking.

On Wednesday morning, we decided to take a walk in the morning before it got too hot, and tried to take the same Nature Walk... we actually ended up on a different trail than the one we had biked on, but it also got us connected back to the Thousand Trails side of the park.

The interesting thing is that these "Nature Walk" trails obviously used to be part of the campground... there are power boxes at various places along the trail...

The trail itself is a dirt road - in most places in decent shape - some places kind of washed out.

I marked with blue arrows the two power boxes that are located on each side of the dirt road at this point. It is apparent that this used to be a much larger campground.

We wonder what the history of the campground might be -- at this point it is a joint KOA / Thousand Trails campground - with dedicated spots for KOA separate from the Thousand Trails spots (KOA having better maintained and nicer sites). I looked at a list I have of the heritage of different Thousand Trails campgrounds, and it is listed as having been a NACO (National American Corporation) campground. The NACO campgrounds came into the Thousand Trails system sometime around 1991. My guess is that there were more campsites than Thousand Trails needed, and so, at some time in the past, they let some of the sites fall into disrepair (purposely or not) and also, at some point in the past, contracted with KOA to manage some of the sites. Actually, all of the campground service personnel seem to be KOA folks, or, at least, they have the bright yellow shirts. 

The Thousand Trails side seems to be a bit more in disrepair, though it does look as if they have recently added gravel to many of the sites, and there have been some electric boxes upgraded to 50A (many are only 30A and the boxes look really, really old). Another odd thing about the Thousand Trails sites is that many of them share the electric/water hookup location with a neighboring site - which means both that the hookups are sometimes a long ways from where you'd like them to be (like at the front of the site instead of the back) and for one of the two sites, the hookups are on the wrong side of the RV, unless you pull into the site instead of backing into it. Just a wee bit odd. Our site has the hookup at the front of the site, but it is on the correct side, and we are easily able to reach our power cord and water hose to the hookups.