Our travel day turned into an episode of Seinfeld
In the RV world, we often get into conversations about whether we're planners or spontaneous travelers. We've met all kinds, from those who book months ahead of time, to those who never book ahead and instead fly by the seat of their, errr, trucks. We lie somewhere in the middle. Planning ensures that we can see and experience all the destinations we choose, but planning too much practically guarantees that we'll end up needing to cancel bookings, because in the full-time travel life, setbacks happen. We've learned to keep spaces in our itinerary, so that if plans change, we aren't paying cancellation fees left and right. That's precisely what happened when we got struck by lightning and needed to go to Indiana for repairs instead of back toward New England for the fall. Now, we tend to plan the big dots on our route, but leave space during days where we don't have much of a preference where we end up. Traveling full-time gives us more flexibility because we don't often need to be in a specific place at a specific time, unlike vacationing RVers.
For example, after spending 5 days in Nashville, we left a gap of 9 days open, before we were due to start a 2-week reservation in Arkansas for the total solar eclipse. In those 9 days, we figured we would take our time moseying through Tennessee, as we had plenty of time to go the 400ish miles. We weren't sure if we would hop to a few Harvest Hosts for overnights, or if we would hunker down at an RV park. As the week approached, we got bombarded with work calls. We're pretty sure it was the most work calls we have ever collectively scheduled in one week since we began RVing. So we knew we'd be better off spending those days in one location because we wouldn't have a lot of time to drive. I looked up RV parks along I-40 between Nashville and Memphis and found Serendipity Brownsville Venue and RV Park, located in Brownsville, TN. The online booking said that one remaining pull-thru was available for Sunday-Friday, which would get us through the majority of our busy week. We booked it Saturday evening and slept easy knowing that we had a plan for the following day.
Our stay in Nashville was fun, but the city stimulation took a lot out of us. We were looking forward to having a relatively short drive - just under 3 hours - and settling into a place where we could hunker down and be productive. We left our KOA in Nashville at check-out time, 11AM because there was no need to leave earlier. Check-in at Serendipity wasn't until 3PM. This gave us plenty of time to drive slow through the Pothole Path of I-40 (if you know, you know), and even take a leisurely break, which we did at one of the truck parking pull-offs. We arrived to Serendipity around 3:30PM.
The reviews for Serendipity were quite positive, with people enjoying the hospitality, the beautiful pond, and the amenities. It seemed like an events venue that added camping spots. Along I-40 we even noticed a couple of billboards advertising their accommodations, and we will say, they were the classiest looking billboards we saw on the whole stretch! One reviewer did say that the check-in process was strange because the office is up a hill, and campers need to park their rigs down below and then walk up to register. We were prepared. We drove up the long drive until we reached signage pointing to the RV spots. We stopped in a parking lot at the bottom of the hill and Anthony went to check in while I stayed in the truck with the pets. A couple of minutes later, Anthony returned and told me that the office was closed for the day and he saw no information about check-ins or off-hour arrivals.
Leaving the pets to hold down the fort, I joined Anthony for a walk up the hill to make sure he hadn't missed anything. Sure enough, the only information was the signage on the door letting us know that they would be closed for the day. Ironically, their typical Sunday hours are only until 2PM, which means that anyone who arrives on a Sunday would arrive to a closed office no matter what. We've seen campgrounds do this before and we don't really understand how it's the best way to operate.
This meant that no one had set foot in the office between the time we made the online reservation and the time we got to the campground. We would expect the system to automatically update availabilities or for staff to have remote admin access to the reservations, and so we decided to scout the campsites. Supposedly one site was open when we booked, and so if we found an empty site, we could likely determine that it's ours and just take it for the night. We could stay hitched just in case and then check with the office the next morning.
And so we walked all of the rows of sites. Thankfully, it's a small campground, or else we would have needed to consider taking our entire rig up there, or perhaps getting our ebikes out, which is not an easy feat. We saw no vacant campsites, not pull-thrus, not back-ins. I think we both expected that outcome because we remained surprisingly calm in our reactions.
The office had an emergency number to call, and at this point we decided our situation was urgent enough. We had already paid for our reservation in full and needed to let someone know what was going on. We returned down the hill and Anthony called the emergency line while I got to work looking for last-minute availabilities in the area.
The woman on the phone was extremely apologetic and did not understand why the online system said a spot was available. She said that they usually keep one pull-thru open for last-minute bookings, but that someone had already booked it. We were not thrilled with the unfortunate turn of events, but we tried to see the glass half-full. The sun wouldn't be setting for another 2.5 hours, so we had plenty more drive time. Granted, if we hadn't taken our extended break and had just arrived an hour early, we would have figured all of this out way sooner. We were also exhausted and really didn't want a long drive day. Alright, so maybe seeing the glass half-full wasn't in the cards. Anthony pointed out that a similar situation happened in Seinfeld. Ah yes, we had indeed become victim of a reservation that turned out to not be a reservation after all.
I don't want to snobbify this post too much, but finding campgrounds in the Memphis area isn't the easiest. Memphis has a lot of crime and many of the campgrounds are too close for our comfort. We lucked out with our stay down at Hernando Point the week prior, but we couldn't return because we had already hit our maximum nights stayed for the month. It would also be a bit too far south, considering we were making our way out west towards Arkansas. Unfortunately, Arkansas between Memphis and Little Rock is even worse. Not a lot of campgrounds to choose from, and some of them weren't giving us great vibes. We tried calling a couple of places that looked good and ended up getting a callback from Village Creek State Park. We had heard that Arkansas state parks are wonderful, but this would be new territory for us. We hadn't even been to Arkansas yet and had no plans to cross the border for another week or so, but we were in desperate times. We could either keep scrounging around for a mediocre campground around Memphis, or we could drive further and get a good site. The downside would be that we'd be in a water and electric only site when we had planned on having full hookups at Serendipity, but we're always ready to be as self-contained as we need to be. After the craziness of Nashville and now the drive, a quiet state park campsite sounded like the reprieve we needed. Since we had the guy on the phone anyway, we asked him what availability was like for the week, and through the weekend, and heck, why not for all 9 nights? He found us a site that was free the whole time, and so we committed to conserving our tank space and booked it.
We had gotten the site just in the nick of time before the state park office closed for the day. We were told to go straight to our site when we got there and to check in the next morning after they reopened. And with that, it was time to get back on the road and drive the remaining 2 hours out to Arkansas. The timing would be perfect; we'd arrive with time to spare before sundown and get settled in before dark.
Only, as soon as we got back on I-40, we hit a traffic jam. We should have known. The plethora of potholes gets even worse around Memphis, and cars speed on through anyway. Sometimes they don't quite make it. We got stuck in not one, but two accident-related traffic jams. Thankfully, everyone seemed to come out of it alive and uninjured, but this meant our window of arriving by sundown was closing in quickly.
We were so frazzled that we could barely celebrate crossing into Arkansas, which was a major milestone: A new state for both me and Anthony, a new state RVed, and our crossing of the Mississippi River, aka the gateway to the West, and always a special moment.
A drive that was supposed to be 4 hours (including stops) and 170 miles turned into 8 hours and 285 miles, but by some stroke of luck, we got to our campsite just after sunset, and the twilight glow gave us just enough light as we parked and set up. We would have been happy arriving anywhere at that point, but coming into Village Creek's campground, we were greeted with the natural surroundings that we love so much. We now have insight into why Arkansas is called the Natural State! If our dramatic drive day led here, then perhaps it was meant to be.
