Day 172 – It rained most of the night and was cloudy & windy when we got up this morning, 49 degrees. We packed up and left around 10:20 a.m., heading closer to the Arkansas border.
195 miles
Pennington Creek City Park Campground, for information contact Tishomingo City Hall, 1130 E. Main Street, Tishomingo, OK 73460, (580) 371-2369, City of Tishomingo Parks Department www.tishomingo.ok.org. This was a small Park on the Pennington Creek 2 blocks off Main Street in the city of Tishomingo. There was a campground host camped there who was away from the campground working during the day, and there were no signs regarding payment or rules or which campsites to take or even if they were open. So, as with all other parks that are first-come, first-served, we drove thru and picked an empty site. This wasn’t difficult since only two other sites were occupied. Some campsites appeared to have no hook-ups while others appeared to have water & electric, and several seemed to have full hook-ups. We chose a nice site with full hook-ups. Before we had hooked up, a man from a campsite next to the host’s campsite came over & said that the electricity was not on in the section we’d chosen, and that the host would be back after 5 p.m. We figured, okay, we can get by fine without electricity, but we did need water and sewer, so we stayed where we were, unpacked, filled with fresh water, and dumped tanks. The sewer hook-up didn’t work properly, but we dumped as best we could. Around 5:30 Rob went over to the host’s site to pay. It was $20 per night for full hook-ups, but he only charged us $15 per night because we had no electricity. People did drive by and circle within the Park fairly often, but it was a Park and the Creek’s water was rising due to the rain storms. But we still couldn’t figure out why people kept slowing down & staring at us. At the end of our second day, the host stopped by to tell us that he’d been contacted by the City & that no one was supposed to be camping at the campsites in the section we were in, & that the sewer hook-up wasn’t working. So although the campground itself wasn’t a bad place to stay, they obviously have some problems with communicating between no one telling the campground host what was going on & there being no signage. Just coincidentally, at the nearby Tishomingo National Wildlife Refuge, we found out there were camping sites in a small campground near the Refuge Headquarters, & several of the Lakes each have one campsite (with no hook-ups) right by the Lake. We checked them all out; our favorites were Reeve’s Ravine South, followed by either the campground near Headquarters or the campsite at Lost Lake. We probably would not return to Pennington Creek City Park Campground again unless they got their #@%$ together.
The sun finally came out in the afternoon. It was 59 degrees at Gore Landing Campground (near Gore, OK) when we arrived at 2:55 p.m., sunny & a little windy. We stopped along the way for gas & lunch at a Walmart parking lot. Our route was Main Street, 377/99N, 70E, 69N, 40E, 10N, 64W, Gore Landing Rd. There were some rolling hills and trees, and there were lots of lakes (some quite large), and prairie land with farms. Not overly interesting and not a lot of pictures to take since it was so cloudy most of the day.
US-69 heading North toward I-40, OK
Back on I-40 again! OK
Our goal for these next couple of days was to find a campground as close as we could get to Sequoyah National Wildlife Refuge. Most of the campgrounds we researched were 30 to 45 minutes away from the NWR. Gore Landing Campground is a County Park located 25 minutes from the Refuge so we decided to check it out first, and if we didn’t like it, we’d work our way outwards from there. We liked it a lot. We picked site #10, private, surrounded by trees, and right on the Illinois River. There was only one other camper at the Park. We unpacked and went outside to sit by the River, which was rushing by, swollen from the recent rains. It’s a lovely campground, small & quiet, and we like being right by the River. There are lots of birds, and that makes the girls happy, too.
