Back to Ohio Amish Country
Berlin, OH - Events of Thursday, October 3 to Sunday, October 6, 2013
On Thursday, we left our comfy RV pad beside Lora and J. Michael's house in Pittsburgh and headed west to Ohio Amish Country in Berlin, OH. To say we love Berlin, OH would be an understatement. We love the rolling hills, the well-kept farms and the good food. We didn't get enough Amish Country when we stayed there for a month in June, so we decided to stop back before we headed south.
When we arrived at Scenic Hills RV Park shortly after noon, we discovered there was a SNAFU with our reservations. The people at Scenic Hills thought we were arriving Tuesday after the weekend instead of the Thursday before. Fall is a very busy time for tourism in Amish Country. Everyone seems to want to enjoy the fall scenery and harvest time in such a beautiful, rural area. Therefore, Berlin is always crowded, and Scenic Hills RV Park is always full on October weekends. Fortunately, someone had left the campground early, so they had a site for us. It wasn't the one we had reserved, but at least we had a site. On Friday, we would have to move, but they were able to shuffle some other reservations so we could move to the site we had originally reserved.
Scenic Hills has sites on three levels. We usually like to get a site on the lower level because there is a lumber mill next door to the campground. The noise from the mill isn't awful, especially since it shuts down at 3:30 or 4:00 in the afternoon and doesn't operate on weekends; but the mill starts work at 6:00 a.m., and we think the noise is less on the lower level. When we made or reservations back in July, there were no vacancies in the lower level for as long as we wanted to stay (like we said, fall is very busy), so we reserved a site all the way at the far end of the top level.
The only sites available for Thursday night was one with full hookups on the middle level (all the regular sites at Scenic Hills have full hookups) or one with electric only in their overflow area. We opted for the full hookup site, mostly because we didn't think we could get Wi-Fi from the overflow site.
Our first site at Scenic Hills
View of some of the other sites on the middle level
The roads at Scenic Hills are tar and chips, and the pads are gravel. The middle level where our first site was located is all gravel, but the sites on the other two levels have grass between them. A little over half the sites at Scenic Hills are back-ins and the rest are pull-throughs. Although a few of the sites are a little close together, site spacing in general isn't too bad for a private campground.
Scenic Hills charges $35 a night with various discounts for stays of longer than 3 nights. Our nightly cost for 11 nights averaged out to a little over $28 a night.
Scenic Hills RV Park has no bathhouse, so all RVs must be fully self-contained; but they do have a laundry. Some sites have 30-amp electric, and some have 30/50 amps. There is free Wi-Fi that isn't super fast, but it is okay most of the time. It really slows down when the campground is full on weekends, especially in the late afternoon when everyone returns from their daily activities. In addition, although there are several transmitters throughout the campground, reception at some sites isn't very good, especially those at the far northern end of the lower level where we stayed part of the time when we were here in June. Berlin, OH is a Verizon 4G area, but the signal strength at the sites on the lower level is very low. We had zero to one bar when we stayed at the far end of the lower level back in June. Fortunately, we had two bars of 4G at our site this time on the middle level which enabled us to switch over to Verizon when the campground Wi-Fi slowed down in the afternoon.
We weren't sure when our site would be available on Friday morning, so we went ahead with our plans to go to Der Dutchman Restaurant in Walnut Creek for the breakfast buffet. It wasn't very busy on Friday, and they only had one buffet line open; but you can bet it was a lot more crowded on Saturday, in which case they had both lines open.
Breakfast buffet at Der Dutchman
After breakfast, we made a quick stop right down the road from Der Dutchman at Walnut Creek Cheese for some cheese curds for snacks. Walnut Creek Cheese has meats, cheeses, home made ice cream, bulk foods and a few regular grocery items. After that, we swung by Winesburg Meats for some smoked sausage patties to grill for dinner that evening and for some beef snack sticks.
By the time we got back to Scenic Hills, our new site had been vacated, so we moved the motor home to the upper level.
Our second site at Scenic Hills
View of our row at Scenic Hills
At the far side of the upper level where our new site was located, we could barely hear the lumber mill. We also still had good Wi-Fi reception and a strong 4G signal so we could switch to Verizon when the campground Wi-Fi slowed down.
On Saturday, we headed to the Walmart in Millersburg to pick up some groceries. It rained off and on all day, and it rained fairly heavily in the evening for a total of 1.77 inches for the day. We spent Sunday relaxing around the motor home watching the NASCAR race.
We don't have much planned for our stay in Berlin except driving some back roads to enjoy the fall scenery (if it quits raining) and enjoying some of our favorite foods. We'll have another update in a few days, so stay tuned.
I am looking forward to seeing some of that beautiful fall foliage.
Enjoy!
Posted by: Marsha Weaver | October 07, 2013 at 05:10 PM