This highway isn't the ideal motor home route. You know it is a narrow winding road when you see arrows on the right telling you to stay left, and arrows on the left instructing you to stay right.
We are taking this highway because we made plans to float the Illinois River. To float a river, you need two vehicles--one parked at the put-in spot, and another parked at the take-out spot. We have two vehicles, even though you might say that the motor home is a rather bulky shuttle vehicle. To use it, we need a large and level parking lot that isn't too crowded, and that's often hard to find along winding rivers. But we had done our research and figured out a way to set up that shuttle so we could float down the Illinois River today. We had called the Grand River Dam Authority office to find out that we could drop off the car at the Peavine Public Access area.
We would have room to drop off the car, then turn the motor home around at Peavine and head back up-river to the campground at Round Hollow Public Access Area. There is one camping spot with electricity at Round Hollow, or plenty of other places to park the motor home and spend the night without electricity as well. We had already planned to just boondock camp here since we need to exercise our generator anyway.
It took a while to figure out this plan for a free 9-mile float trip on the Illinois River. We include all the details in our blog because we hope to get to use that plan one day. But it's not going to work today. Today we have rain and temperatures in the 40s. Even if it's free, it's just not worth it to float nine miles down a river in the rain when it's that cold. So we ditched the free river float idea, and went to plan B. That's exploring another Oklahoma state park. Welcome to our camp site at Cherokee Landing State Park!
Instead of camping along the Illinois River, we are on the north side of Lake Tenkiller. This lake is famous in Oklahoma for its clear water. In fact, scuba divers from all over the state come here to train and dive in this clear water--but probably not today. With a high temperature in the low 50s, we did break the record for the lowest high temperature for this day in northeast Oklahoma. That is a record that was set over 100 years ago!
With those cool temperatures, we wore jackets to explore more of our new state park. When we made our reservation, we were surprised to see that two of the larger campgrounds were closed. We could still see the logs and debris that was the result of the flooding from last summer that closed many of the camp sites here at Cherokee Landing state park.
In the middle of that closed campground we found a lone swing set with nice views of the lake. After months of seeing playgrounds roped off with caution tape, Denisa is enjoying a good swing and a nice view. Bonus!
On a chilly evening in an almost empty campground, we noticed smoke coming up in the fire ring next to us. It looks like our neighbors didn't know that the embers were still glowing when they left their camp site. We found that by adding a little firewood we could quickly have a nice camp fire.
There's a widely-known camping rule that stipulates that a nice camp fire means that we must roast marshmallows! We didn't have any graham crackers and chocolate, so we invented a new campfire dessert--a bakery chocolate chip cookie, smeared with a toasted marshmallow and topped with freshly shelled pecans. That's a good way to end a record-breaking-lowest-high-temperature kind of day.
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