From the category archives:

Camping Connection

Camping Connection – Florida’s Flatwater

By Bill Steiden
The popular image of canoeing is eternally linked with 1972’s Deliverance – four men shooting deadly Class V rapids on a wild, remote river in wooden canoes. And that wasn’t the riskiest part of their adventure.

But nowadays, the backwoods folks are in the tourist trade, and they’ll tell you that kind of river-running [...]

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Camping Connection – Small & Stylish, Teardrops Are Worth a Look

By Bill Steiden
There’s a good reason Elkhart, Ind., is the epicenter of U.S. unemployment. It’s the capital of recreational vehicle manufacturing at a time when spending on luxury items, such as RVs, is declining fast, and fuel prices are in flux after reaching record levels in 2008.
Yet as the RV industry’s teardrops fall, they’re on [...]

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Camping Connection – When the Twinkling Lights Are City Lights

By Bill Steiden
One of the big draws for most who go camping is a change in surroundings from our workaday urban or suburban world. We want to see trees, streams, fields, mountains – something other than cars and concrete to break the routine of our lives.
Yet a pair of unique camping destinations, one in the [...]

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Camping Connection – The Devil in the Ozarks

By Chris Reinolds
Tucked away in the northwest corner of Arkansas, Devil’s Den State Park is a wonderland of hiking, backpacking, spelunking and other outdoor delights. Lee Creek Valley, where the park is located, is set in the ancient sedimentary mountains renowned for their natural beauty and lush oak-hickory forest.
Geologists believe that, between 10,000 and 70,000 [...]

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Camping Connection – National Park Alternatives

By Bill Steiden
America’s national parks are due for a celebration. The first, Yellowstone, was declared in 1872, and it was President Woodrow Wilson who established the National Park Service in 1916. But President Theodore Roosevelt, whose term in office ended one hundred years ago this year, gets the credit for building the backbone of what [...]

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Camping Connection – The Very First National Seashore

Story and photos by Bill Steiden
A little less than fifty years ago, a bridge opened across the Outer Banks’ Oregon Inlet, connecting North Carolina’s Roanoke and Hatteras islands. That could have been the ruination of the most pristine coastline in the Southeast.
Just as on many of Florida’s barrier islands, easy automotive access threatened to sow [...]

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Camping Connection – A New England Experience Where?

By Bill Steiden
A rocky-shored island with granite cliffs and gravelly beaches in a northern clime, surrounded by sailboat-studded blue waters; a summer resort set in a Victorian village, accessible by ferry and steeped in history.
Martha’s Vineyard, right?
Actually, Ohio.
South Bass Island is part of a chain extending from Ohio’s Marblehead Peninsula to Ontario’s Point Pelee that [...]

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Camping Connection: And On His Farm He Pitched a Tent

By Bill Steiden
Agritourism is a fancy word for an idea that has been around for a long time. The West is dotted with dude ranches, many of them in business for almost a century. They began to spring up almost as soon as the once-Wild West was tamed, drawing Easterners whose romantic notions of the [...]

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Camping Connection: Clean, Cool & Clear – Florida’s Answer to the Summer Heat

By Bill Steiden
Ever since the early European explorers set foot in Florida, people have been coming to its subtropical peninsula in search of treasure. The quest continues, though the goal now is not to find gold and jewels, but the perfect vacation.
Every day, thousands of tourists pass through north central Florida on I-75, heading for [...]

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Camping Connection: Whitewater Rafting the Nantahala River, North Carolina

By Chris Reinolds
Rushing rapids, cool water and stunning scenery are just a few of the ways to describe the experience of paddling a raft on the Nantahala River in North Carolina.
The Nantahala, a Cherokee Indian term meaning “the place where only the noonday sun can shine,” starts southwest of Asheville near the border between [...]

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