Chattahoochee Bend State Park can be found along a bend in the Chattahoochee River in western Georgia. My experience with it was to use it as a base camp to explore some semi near areas of Georgia (see also Cochran Mill Park), and I did not use the park for anything more than being a place to sleep, yet this park lives in infamy in my mind. The reason for that is because of the camp host experience. A lot of state parks in different states use camp hosts, and sometimes you never see or hear from them, or perhaps they do some check in duties when normal park staff is done for the day. I arrived later in the evening than the park staff would have been there, so the experience was to gather a packet of information the park staff left out for me, complete with a gate cope for the improved camping loop I had reserved, and enter around 10pm. By 10pm you don’t normally expect much to be going on at a state park campground due to quiet hours and most people having gone to sleep, and my own plan was simple: get in, quietly set up tent, crash.
Anyway it looked peaceful as I rolled into the campsite, a typical paved strip in a campground that is easy for RVs to access and also claims tents are viable. Before I even have a chance to set up, a guy, the campground host, appears out of nowhere. Being that it is after 10pm I’m already thinking this person is too on the ball for the hour. He starts ranting about how someone was driving a couple miles an hour over the campground’s speed limit, which was I think 10mph on the signs, so the person he’s apparently out hunting in the darkness must have been going 12mph? Who cares. Apparently the camp host. He leaves.
The next morning I’m enjoying coffee and he reappears again, this time to complain that I’ve set my tent up on the grass next to my car. That one is my bad, because if I’d hunted down every single rule for this park I’d have learned that even though there’s perfect lawn right there where a tent would be perfect within my own site, I have to place the tent on the scratchy RV pad. This seems to be common in Georgia’s state parks, and always annoys me because tents are not really made to be on asphalt, gravel and similar. Whatever, I literally un-stake my tent and drag it 6 feet away to be on the gravel.
The rest of the time I was there I just couldn’t help feeling scrutinized and watched with this guy being a little too pro-active in his hosting duties. He did a suspicious amount of dog walking patrolling the area and gave me the vibe of a beat cop. So not my favorite place to use for camping purposes. But the campground itself was fine for what it is worth. There was a very clean and modern bathroom, which had a little free library setup outside of it, and although I wasn’t using the park for this purpose, I could tell it’d be a great place to stay if someone wanted to do some boating, kayaking or fishing on the Chattahoochee River. On a final note whenever I go somewhere I try to buy a patch and a magnet to remember the experience, from whatever park store exists. They didn’t have any patches available at the moment, so I had one custom made that now hangs on my wall and it bears a few charming words in regards to the experience which I’m not going to share here.
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