Black Bear Cove, Benton, Tennessee

                  Wednesday 10/9/2013

We left Vonore, TN. and move down the road some 42 miles south to Benton, TN. Our drive followed the Appalachian Mountains to the east.

Less than a mile off Hwy 411, we turned into the drive of Black Bear Cove RV Resort. There is an entrance and an exit into the park. Unfortunately there is a tree on the left side of the  entrance drive that scraped our side and roof as we came in. If you are a big rig, take the exit in and avoid the tree branches that need to be cut back.

The drive into the park starts out as a single vehicle paved road,

After a short drive you come to a Y in the road. The road to the left takes you up a hill to the Lodge, and the road to the right takes you to the campground. The road turns to gravel at this point.

This is the second sign that tells us this campground is not well managed.

The road continues around a large open grass area.

We finally come to the campground. No one is in what looks like the office. The office building is completely empty inside like remodeling is going on. A resident happens to go by, and her way to the laundry and tells us the owner is weeding at the pool area. She directs Joe to our already assigned site. We drive to the site and we do not like the large tree hanging over the site. It looks like more low hanging branches.

After checking out our assigned site, I looked at the other empty sites, asking Joe if he thinks any of the others would be better. As Joe and I are mulling the situation over, the owner walks over and asked if there is a problem. I tell her the assigned site will not work because of the low hanging branches, and then tell her how the tree next to the entrance scraped the side and roof of our Nest. She didn't apologize and just said she didn't realize the tree was a problem. She told us we could take any site that we wanted, so we found one with no trees.

This park has a lot of potential, but for some reason things have really been let go. We had great mountain views behind us,

and in front of us. Behind us, way past the open field is a river.

The park has a nice pool setting,

and a pavilion, volleyball, and playground area in the center of the park.

I took this picture of the laundry/shower/ and what we thought was the office ( that was completely empty) a couple of days after we had arrived. The day we arrived the whole front area was full of weeds. This day, someone had weeded around the front bushes, but much weeding still needed to be done. There was another large flower bed that was completely taken over by weeds. It almost seemed to us that someone had just bought the place and was working on cleaning it up. We knew that wasn't true because the owner said when we complained about the first site with the low hanging branches that we were given, that she couldn't believe the tree had grown so much, as she had planted when it was just a twig. In defense of the owners of the park, the SE got hammered all summer and early fall with rain, so maybe this is the first dry spell  they have had to get things done that they couldn't, all summer long.