The Findley State Park and Labor Day Crowds

Over the last year and 8 months, we have developed a basic philosophy of traveling in our motor home. When we are looking for a new campground, we look for one close to some point of interest, that is about two hours from our current campground. We'll stay at the new place for 4 to 7 days, exploring in every direction around our new home. These exploration trips are often on the tiny back roads, and we really enjoy seeing how and where the locals live. 

We're in the middle of Ohio dairy country right now. At one time there were 40 cheese factories in this county, making it the cheese capitol of the country. We were certainly disappointed to find that they had all closed, because we would love to find a good cheese factory today! Now, this agricultural area is punctuated with big barns, and we are fascinated with all the silos. The new concrete and metal silos are probably more functional, but we really prefer the appearance of the old rock and brick silos. One of the reasons we prefer the back roads is that we have found that you just don't get the views of the old farmsteads along the interstate.

On another little road trip, we traveled northwest to the port town of Huron, Ohio. We just kept driving north until we hit the water.

We think it is a little curious that a town named Huron is not on Lake Huron. Instead, it is situated on Lake Erie. Their lighthouse is very industrial-looking, but we were glad to see a long rock jetty that allowed us to get close to it. In fact, Mark made the perilous walk across the rocks to actually get on the lighthouse foundation, while Denisa preferred to stay on more even ground.

Sometimes we are so busy with little road trips that we don't have time to explore our own campground. That happened to us this time, as we were camping six days before we made it to the other side of the lake at the state park.

We were surprised to see sizable snails at the edge of the water.

We also found a few deer grazing in a state park meadow. But just like us, they spent most of the Labor Day weekend hiding out from the crowds of people that converged on the park on Friday evening.

We went from an almost empty campground, to every spot being full by Friday evening. There are over 200 campsites in Findley State Park, so it certainly changed the feel of the park when enough people arrived to fill all those spots.

There are reservation markers on every camp site, and they all listed Labor Day Monday as their departure date. That means that the dump station that was right across the street from our site was busy all day. So we spent the day inside, allowing all the weekenders to pack up so they could get back to work tomorrow. We were at work ourselves, spending the day researching future campgrounds. We are plotting our strategy for the next few weeks, when we are expecting a guest to join us. Then we are on the road again, to a new location and new wonders to explore.