Alabama - Day 30

Riverside RV Resort
Monday, 30 December 2019

This campground seems very pleasant on first impression.  My next door neighbors told me they both work in Pensacola, had moved into their 5th wheel full time last year, and had planned to move from one campground to another in the area, since there are so many of them (though mostly expensive).  But they liked this one so well, they'd been here for more than a year and planned to stay a while longer. 

The campground has only 52 campsites, is well-run, clean, very good showers and laundry facilities, surrounded by thick trees though none in the campground itself, quiet, several small green spaces for the dogs to use, reasonably priced.  On the other hand, one of the campground's safety lights shone brightly in my bedroom windows all night long.  And there were anthills in the campground, at my campsite, and one ant in my cabin (where there's one, there're bound to be more).

But what was it that made the campground become absolutely intolerable for me?  The situation my dogs and I were stuck in.  There seemed to be dozens of dogs, even with so few campsites, and many of them were the size of my dogs and just as excitable.  As a result, it was really hard for me to find a time I could walk my dogs that we wouldn't run into several others.  And the way the campground was laid out, there were few escape routes we could go on if we ran into a dog along our walk.

Almost the only place we could go to get away was the steep road into the campground, which we did, and had our return blocked twice by dogs walking toward us on the same road, who were fortunately walked by sensible people who turned back before they got too close to us.

Just one full day of that bored my dogs almost to tears, and made it hard for them to deal with all their pent-up energy.

I did my laundry and took a shower and cleaned the RV's cabin and worked on the blog, but I also got more and more frustrated.  I'd intended to spend all of tomorrow doing the same thing in the same place and finally realized I just couldn't do it - either to the dogs or to myself.  So I also spent time today finding another campground to move to that I could afford and that wasn't too out-of-the-way.

I knew I had zero excuse for getting a refund for the next night so didn't say anything to the campground about leaving.  In fact, I was so irritated that I made a point of telling them that I'd be leaving for the grocery store, which meant taking the RV itself, but they weren't to think that meant anything.  I didn't want to tell them I wasn't coming back and give them the chance of making a double profit on the site I'd already paid for. 

Maybe not a fair position for me to take because it wasn't the campground's fault I couldn't walk my dogs one at a time (making them easier to control), but the whole place just got to me.

This is the first time (and I hope the last) that I've shelled out money for two campgrounds for the same night.  But I started to feel desperate to find some place we oddballs would feel welcome, so it seemed worth the extra expense.