California - Day 19 - in the campground in the redwoods

Cotillion Gardens RV Park, Felton

Saturday, 19 March 2022

I have to agree this is a beautiful area.  My campsite was in a small stand of redwoods, a little isolated from the other campsites.  I couldn't decide whether to show you how wide the little stand was or how high the trees were, so I'm showing you both.

I couldn't get far enough back to show the tops of the trees.

As predicted, it did rain today, though I guess we didn't get as much down here as in places farther north.  Still, I found us out walking in the rain a couple of times today - which was actually a good thing because that meant we'd run into fewer people out walking their dogs.

This campground was absolutely packed with dogs, a surprising number of them being full-blooded pit bulls.  Surprising because so often campgrounds won't accept even pit mixes.

There were also a lot of little kids - this was a weekend after all, and I guess it's a place where families come for vacation.  Without thinking, I'd chosen a campsite right next to the basketball court and very near the playground, so poor Gracie had to suffer palpitations at the noises.  She's better than she used to be but still is terrified of the sound of a bouncing ball.

Part way through the day I realized I was having mild flashbacks to my years in Juneau.  As I was there, here I was in a dense forest of large old trees with ferns all over and rain coming down.  I suddenly found myself thinking, I've already done this and I decided to leave, so what am I doing here now?  But it was a pretty place and only for a weekend.

Still, this was a weird campground that I wouldn't want to come back to, but only because of the staff.  Once when the dogs and I were walking around, one of the staff came up to us and said we'd need to leave where we were because it was "somebody's campsite."  But I knew it wasn't.  Nobody was there, and nobody was likely to come in right now because there were other vacancies and that particular spot wasn't very desirable.  He was just being officious, while I was just trying to dodge the other dogs that were being taken for walks.  That's the first time in all this traveling that somebody's told me that.

When I was checking in yesterday, I was in line behind a man who turned out to be the 2nd of 3 groups of campers from Québec.  Then it was my turn and we were part way through the process when #3 turned up behind me.  The clerk asked me to wait while she checked him in because he was part of that other group.  That made no sense to me at all - I mean, they were all paying separately and had separate sites - so I asked her how much more we had to do to finish me up.  Her answer was to ask another staff member to check in Mr. #3, which she hadn't done for me while I stood and waited for #2.  And #3 stood so close to me it was hard to avoid bumping.  It turned out his check-in took as long as mine, and I can't even imagine why this woman thought I should stand and wait for him.

Then when I was about to pay, she told me they charged a large extra fee if I paid with a credit card, which was the first time I'd heard that from them.  Even though I'd made my reservation over the phone, and even though they could have posted a sign saying so, she waited until I was ready to finish to let me know.  So I had to walk all the way back to the RV (passing the group of Canadians who were all standing around yukking it up, not in any kind of hurry), get some cash and walk all the way back.  I'd had a lot of driving today and was really tired, but the extra fee she was springing on me was substantial enough that I made the trek anyway.

She showed me on the campground map where the access points were to the next door state park, but I found out when I went to take the dogs there that dogs aren't allowed on the park's trails, something she didn't bother to tell me.  This campground also had no dog park or even a dog walk, so I had a hard time figuring out where to walk mine.  Especially with hyper-vigilante staff roaming around to tell me where I couldn't walk.

Their wifi system was too spotty for me to be able to rely on and my hot spot had trouble getting a clear signal because we were down in a deep valley in a thick stand of trees.

I just thought this was definitely not a user-friendly campground, though I saw many others who were having a great time.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  And the trees were indeed beautiful.