Travel dates: July 21-24, 2017
It’s here! It’s here! It’s the very last post about our summer 2017 cross country road trip! Except I’m going to do an indexing kind of post so people can find everything easily now that they’re all written. Because there are a lot of posts.
Dallas is getting short shrift in this post just like it did on our actual trip. I was going to devote a whole post to it, but we were there less than twenty four hours and didn’t have time to do much, and I really need to finish up the posts about last summer because now we’re on our 2018 summer trip, so…sorry, Dallas.
But I do want to give a quick shout out to the Dallas/Arlington KOA. This KOA, tucked into a super suburban area, in between strip malls, was a great stopover for us. It’s about 35 minutes from Dallas and even closer to Fort Worth, so it’d be a good home base for a trip that includes both cities.
We spent our lone afternoon in Dallas at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science; it’s a great museum and HUGE–we didn’t get to nearly all of it.
Dallas at least gets more blog space than Lincoln Parish Park in Louisiana, where we stayed the next night. It was pretty nice, though–good overnight stop (but SO humid. I was a little panicky that this was what Atlanta is like, and I’d just forgotten. But Atlanta is not as bad. Elevation, I guess. I mean, it’s humid, but not Louisiana humid).
And then on to our very last stop, Tannehill Ironworks State Park, about half an hour west of Birmingham, AL. We really liked this place and hope to make it back sometime for a long weekend trip. The campground is huge, but they don’t take reservations, so that would give me pause about planning a weekend trip. It was no problem at all getting a site mid-week in July. Full hook-up sites are $30, and W/E are $25. We got a full hook up site, but in retrospect I can’t remember why, since we were just there one night. After looking around, it seems like the W/E sites are, in general, the nicer, more private ones, so we’d go that route next time.
Our pull-through site was fine, although there was quite a bit of trash left in the site, and there was a ditch on either side, so we had to navigate carefully.
The bathhouse was clean and nice, but unairconditioned, which made it nearly unbearable while we were there.
So the campground itself was nice but nothing amazing….but there was a ton to do in the park, and that plus its proximity to Birmingham is what makes us likely to return.
For example, the park is full of our favorite: the remains of industry!! As the name suggests, you can see the remains of the old, Civil War era ironworks in the park, a short distance from the campground:
They also have an iron and steel museum (closed while we were there), a pioneer farm, train, ice cream shop, country store, and crafts cabins with artisans.
And extensive hiking trails. We took a short hike in the morning before we left and saw this guy staring at us from the woods:
And then we went home! After 59 days and 30 stops and a whole bunch of great stuff seen.
Maybe you would like to pin this?
I think this is the park we went to when it opened, more than thirty years ago and I’ve been meaning to go back ever since. Unsurprisingly there seem to be more exhibits (or whatever you’d call them) now. Must try harder.
The armadillos are really taking over! I visited Alabama regularly between 1953 and 1989, and I have never seen an armadillo. I have never heard of anyone in south Alabama (relatives and friends amount to more than a hundred people spread over six or seven counties) who has seen one.
Other people have been surprised about the armadillo in Alabama, too–I guess they must be spreading!