Living Our Dream: Caesar Creek State Park, OH

October 04, 2011

Caesar Creek State Park, OH

Wilmington, OH - Events of Tuesday, Sept. 27 to Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2011

From Pittsburgh, we headed to Caesar Creek State Park in Wilmington, OH near Waynesville. Caesar Creek has always been a favorite campground of ours. The grassy sites are huge, and the roads and pads are paved. Caesar Creek has only electric hookups, and they are all 30 amp. Water spigots where you can fill your fresh water tanks are located throughout the campground. The next photo shows our site at Caesar Creek.

Caesar Creek is usually almost empty and very quiet on weekdays, especially after Labor Day, as you can see from the next photo showing the view down the road from our site.

There were a few more sites taken in the non-reserveable loop, and the campground was about 2/3 full on the weekend; but there were only a few other campers most of the rest of the time.

Along with some of the other Ohio State Parks, Caesar Creek honors Passport America for half-price camping on Sunday through Wednesday nights to try to attract more visitors during those slower days. However, the campground is usually filled on summer weekends; and on holiday weekends, it can get pretty zooy.

After all the running around we did while in Pittsburgh, it was nice to relax a while. But we didn't just sit around the whole time. Since the campground was almost empty, Paul hooked up a hose to the spigot near our site and scrubbed the road grime from our fabric tow shield. Margery went to Willmington for a haircut, she worked on menus for our new Belly Fat Cure low carb/low sugar diet, and we made two stops Walmart to pick up some groceries.

Speaking of our new diet, we casually followed some of the general guidelines of the diet for about two weeks back when we were staying in Berlin, OH, and we have been adhering more strictly to the rules for about the last two weeks (with the exception of eating out three times while in Pittsburgh). We have both lost about 5 pounds already. That is an average of a little over a pound a week, which we think is an excellent rate - not too fast, but fast enough to be encouraging.

Caesar Creek Flea Market is about 10 minutes from Caesar Creek State Park; and when we're in the area, we usually head there on Saturday after having the breakfast buffet at Der Dutchman in nearby Waynesville. The restaurant in Waynesville was part of the Der Dutchman chain of restaurants we wrote about recently when we visited Berlin, OH. Unfortunately, the Waynesville restaurant had a devastating fire about a year ago, and the owners decided not to rebuild.

Saturday was cold and rainy anyway, so with Der Dutchman gone, we had no excuse to venture out. Therefore, we decided to wait until Sunday to go to the Flea Market. Sunday was still cold (it went down to 37º overnight), but it was sunny, and the wind had died down.

Caesar Creek Flea Market is an indoor/outdoor market that is open year round. The outdoor vendors sell mostly used household merchandise and collectibles like glassware. We walked over to see how many vendors there were, and the photo below shows about a third of the vendors there. Since they were kind of sparse and scattered all over the parking lot, we decided to skip the outdoor section.

As we started through the first building, Paul stopped to check out some bungee cords that had nice snap hooks on the ends that would be less likely to slip off than standard hooks.

Paul didn't buy any bungee cords, but he ended up buying some sandpaper and a small polishing disc for our aluminum wheels. Margery scanned a couple of used book stalls, but much to Paul's relief didn't find anything interesting.

In front of the flea market buildings, there is a long, covered row of outdoor vendors that we walked through on our way back to the car. At the end, there was a vendor with dozens of colorful pumpkins and gourds. The scene was very fitting for a cool, fall morning.

After the flea market, we went back to the motor home to watch the Steeler game and the NASCAR race. We didn't watch the Steeler game long - they played even worse than the score indicates (Texans 17 - Steelers 10). We enjoyed watching the campground empty out a whole lot more than watching the game.

We relaxed the rest of our time at Caesar Creek. We had a couple of nice sunsets, but one evening was particularly beautiful.

We previously said, the speed with which we head south will depend on the speed with which the weather cools off. In spite of several cool days in Berlin, several more in Pittsburgh, and a good bit of even cooler weather at Caesar Creek, the 10-day forecast shows a definite warming trend. Therefore, we will be doing a little more meandering and a little less speeding. We'll tell you about where we went in our next post.

Posted on October 04, 2011 | Permalink

Comments

CONGRATULATIONS on the weight lose. That is the perfect amount to lose each week! I haven't started mine yet but hope to once we get back to Houston.
The campground looks lovely!
Love the colorful mum picture. Enjoy the quiet!

Posted by: Marsha | October 05, 2011 at 07:32 AM