Harpeth River Bridge Campground; Not as Advertised, but It Worked Out

My original plan was to spend two weekends in Nashville, so a twelve day stay. I was looking for a site with full hook-ups, and RV Parky, the app I use for planning, had Harpeth River Bridge listed with full hook-ups.

So I went to the recreation.gov website and based on this photo of a spacious site right on the river, chose site 14.

When we pulled in, we thought site 14 was occupied, as there was a C-class Motorhome in the driveway. It turns out that this site has a shared driveway, not as spacious as I thought. And there was no sewer hook- up. How did I get that wrong? I checked RV Parky and sure enough, they listed sewer. I sent them an edit.

Then I went back and checked the recreation.gov site. Under Full Hookup it says 50, which would make you think it has full hookups with 50 amp electric. So it wasn’t me, but now we were here without sewer. But happily I had cut out one weekend to be in Memphis and we are only here for 8 days, and not having a sewer hookup is easily manageable.

It does have the river, seen here from my seat under our awning.

And it does have the bridge.

And although there’s not a lot of room for walking Matey I was able to get him both a grooming appointment and a vet appointment in the area (both of those scheduled months ago).

I even took the time to put up my Halloween decorations. I’ve been carrying them around for four years and decided I should either put them up or get rid of them.

I took Matey down to a nearby boat ramp at the confluence of the Harpeth and Cumberland Rivers. It was a pretty spot but there wasn’t really anywhere to walk there either.

There is a nearby disc golf course, so Matey has gotten some exercise while we played.

We drove over to the Cheatham Lock and Dam on the Cumberland River and watched this tug coming out of the lock…

pushing its string of barges. There were fifteen barges in the group, three wide and five long.

I tried to get a photo of the whole array, but it hardly fit in the frame!

Down river we saw another tug with 9 barges…

and four pleasure boats waiting to lock through.

We were surprised that they had the pleasure boats come up…

and cut in front of the tug and barges. They locked them through first. Having traversed the Welland Canal twice with pleasure boats we know that would never happen there. Commercial traffic has precedence and you can wait for hours for your turn in the locks.

So despite this not being what we expected, we are enjoying the area, and the turtles…

and the birds.

Harpeth River Bridge Campgound has turned out to be fine.