A Nice Start to the Weekend!! - Saturday, August 28, 2010

Yesterday, Friday, Nancy was off from work and I had only one early appointment. After I was finished, we decided to take a ride and scope out a future campground.  We drove 2 1/2 hours to Cheraw State Park in Cheraw, SC.  The weather was warm - 93 degrees - but it was sunny and a beautiful day for an air conditioned drive.

Nancy and I had both done some preliminary work on the computer getting information about the park.  Check out the web site: Cheraw State Park

Click on map to enlarge it.

It has many positive attributes, but the one I like most is the Tom Jackson designed 18 hole golf course.  So our first stop at the park was the Pro Shop where we picked up score cards and got pricing info for future play.  WOW--I can play a championship course for, at most, $35 even on the weekend with a cart!!
Pro Shop

Driving Range behind Pro Shop

18th Hole across the street from Pro Shop

Our next stop was at the Park Office where we inquired about the campsites and kayak rentals.

Park Office

Kayak and Canoe Rentals

We have our Sea Eagle Kayak, but our good friends -- Bill and Chris, may go with us and they would need to rent a kayak or a canoe. If you look at the map, you will see that the lake is in the middle of the park.  The golf course, cabins and park office are on one side and the campground and boat launch are on the other.  At the far south end of Lake Juniper, near Turkey Oak Trail, are the Cypress Groves which we would love to kayak through.  Here is a picture from the Web Site of the groves.  Hope we can get our own picture when we stay here.
Cypress Groves

We decided to walk the boardwalk around the northern end of the lake over to the campground.  It is about 3/4 of mile.  Before we did that, we did a little tailgating. 
Nancy had packed P&J sandwiches.  Now, these are not just any old P&Js, these are the adult version.  Nancy makes homemade peanut-cashew butter and we have that on whole wheat bread with all fruit jelly!! We add some multi-grain chips and there you have one of my favorites!!

After lunch, we headed off on the Boardwalk along the north end of the lake to the campground.

It was a beautiful walk along the lake.  We crossed over the bridge which goes above the dam that forms Lake Juniper.
The Boardwalk

Bridge over the dam.

View from Bridge looking north.

View from Bridge looking south.

Just past the bridge, you come to the boat launch area.  There was no one there today.  I don't imagine it gets very busy as you can only have a max of 10 horsepower motors on this lake.  That really makes this place peaceful and quite!

Boat Launch Area

Directly next to this area is the campground. There are only 16 sites, all with water and electric, but no sewer. There is a comfort station with nice showers in the middle of all the sites.  The campsites were well manicured.  Sites 6 - 16 were right on the lake.  We would love to get one of the water front sites so we could launch the kayak or fish right from our site!!  Nancy snapped several pictures of the campground and we made notes of our favorite sites.
Entering campground from boat launch path.

Sites 15 & 16 very private and on the lake!!

Site 16 has a separate pad for the picnic table...I think I can see a screened tent in it's future!!

Comfort Station

Sites 7 & 8 are right on the water also and very nice!!

We made our way back to the car and rode through the rest of the park.  It is very beautiful and so quiet.  This is truly a hidden gem.  There are only 16 campsites and 8 cabins, so you will not have much company if you camp here!!  We hope to do just that in the fall.

We drove home via a different route and stopped in McBee at McLeod's farm for peaches!!

Then we passed by The Track That Is Too Tough To Tame....
Darlington Motor Speedway

We ended our day with a trip to Bass Pro Shop where we purchased a couple of visors for Nancy.  After that, we had dinner out at Ruby Tuesday's.  It was a really NICE Day!!

We did get up early today (Saturday) and ride our bikes almost 23 miles with the group ride.  I say with the group ride, but they (the group) took off at 18+ mph.  Nancy and I became our own group and enjoyed our ride with each other, content to pedal at 13-15 mph.  Of course, we have a few years on most of them and we were the only ones with hybrid bikes.  That's our story and we're sticking with it.

It has been a nice start to a good weekend.  Nancy has to work tomorrow afternoon and I plan to play a little golf.  The trip on Friday did a lot to rejuvenate our spirits and get us back to thinking about our future camping trips.  We had a GREAT TIME!!


7 comments:

  1. Wow, nice place! We will put that on our list when we finally full time. My kind of campground for sure!

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  2. Yes that does sound like a wonderful state park. We've stayed at a few in SC and it makes me realize how pitiful the NC state park system is.

    Syl

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  3. What a nice CG, hopefully it won't be much longer and you'll be able to stay at places like that all the time.

    Can the sites take larger RVs? If they can we'll have to put it on our list to visit.

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  4. If you go to the web site and click on camping and then park reservations, you will come to a page that has a facility map button and you can see are the details about each site. But in short, there are several sites that will accomodate 45ft RVs.

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  5. Hi Nancy and Bill-
    Dan and Tricia here (met you at the rally in April). We camped at this park in July (site 9) and absolutely loved it. If you get a chance to go again, check out their bike trail. We had a blast on that as well as kayaking the lake. Take care.

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  6. Thanks for the input Dan and Tricia. We saw that the bike trails were on the other side of Route 1 and did not get over there. I guess we thought they were really mountain bike trails. Can you tell us if that is the case or not? We can do a little off road with our bikes, but they really are meant for paved road riding.

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  7. We had regular street bikes (nothing fancy) and managed the trails fine. There are some sandy spots that were difficult to maneuver but mostly hard packed soil. Lots of hills though! Tons of fun. Take care.

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