The route from Leonard to Angola (at least the first quarter or so) was a pothole-ridden trip down memory lane, as this was Sam’s old path to Ann Arbor back in her college days. Unfortunately for us, we still had a few hours left on our journey once we passed the exit towards Ann Arbor. However, on the plus side, this also meant that we were finally putting Detroit in our rear view for good.
Thankfully, the rest of the trek to Angola was largely uneventful, and we were able to weather the Michigan potholes without any major damage to our truck/trailer. It wasn’t long after entering Indiana before we were pulling into our campground, the Pokagon State Park. Hell, this place was so big that we still had about 10 minutes of driving before we made it to our campsite upon entering the park!
Overall, this park wasn’t our favorite campground. In a sense, it was the ultimate state park. Although it had plenty of pros – pretty, green, cheap, and full of activities to do throughout the week, the cons ended up being more numerous – loud (lots of riffraff), no water/sewer hookups, and in the few places where you could find water, the quality was terrible (it even had a green tint to it 🤢). Another downside of this place were the intense thunderstorms which rolled through like clockwork each evening around 10-11. As you can see from the picture above, our site was tucked into some trees with large branches overhanging our camper, which left us petrified that one of these big limbs would fall on us if the wind blew too hard. Thankfully, our prayers paid off and we managed to make it out of there without a major hole in our roof!
That being said, we still managed to enjoy our time here – whether hanging out at the beach along the adjacent lakes or taking advantage of the bike trails throughout the park on our new e-bikes!
We really didn’t venture outside of the state park that whole week, except for one time when we took the hour-or-so drive west to nearby Elkhart, Indiana (aka the RV capital of the world) to tour the Grand Design factory where our camper was constructed! (Technically, we were touring the Solitude area of the property, which is a more upscale line than our Imagine, but it was close enough.)
This was such a cool experience, and quite a bit different than our normal tourist-y activities. Not only were we blown away by the scale of the operation, but their acute attention to detail was something that I had underappreciated before touring the factory. Grand Design’s quality control process was super impressive and absolutely nothing went unnoticed/uncorrected before the units rolled out of the factory. Although I always knew that we had a good camper, I felt even better about our rig after our little day trip to Elkhart!
After nearly two straight months of camping with visitors, it was honestly a little nice to have a week to just ourselves. But the socializing hiatus was short lived, as our next stop in southern Indiana, just across the border from Louisville was about as social as you can get! Tune in next time when we make our way south of Ohio River and into Kentucky for a fun-filled week with friends and family!