Lordy, this was a trip I will never forget, and not in a good way. Don Carter is one of Georgia's newest state parks, in Gainesville. It's only about an hour from us, so we thought it would be a nice little weekend camping trip. Well first off, ALWAYS make sure you're not booking a walk-in campsite unless you plan to walk in a good ways. From the map, it looked like our site was very close to the parking area. No, it was not. We had decided to bring our German Shepherd, Rusty, but he had gotten sick twice going over the mountain. After getting to the campsites, there was one cart for 5 of us to carry our stuff in. Some nice man lent us his own wagon to borrow. Not realizing how far of a hike it was, we way over packed with a cooler, firewood and more. On top of that, it was blazing hot. I was dying by the time we got everything to the site.
We unroll our bundle of wood, and this wood is straight green. We can't get a fire to start from that to save our lives. You're not really supposed to gather firewood from the parks but we had no choice. We were super tired and ready for bed, so we crawl into the tent. It is so hot though that trying to get any sleep is so hard. Finally drift off, just to wake up on the ground. Our air mattress has a hole in it. Then drift off again, and here comes a train blowing its horn...every. single. hour. Some of the worst sleep of our lives. The next day, we see that mid-morning to early afternoon, our site has no shade at all. We are frying. We try to go down to the lake, and dogs are not aloud, so we can't go. And this lake is PACKED. There was no room to move in this lake. People were within arms length of each other. We weren't really having fun, to be honest. Not all of that is the park's fault. The park was very nice and there was another campground that you didn't have to walk in, and it had bathrooms. So maybe had I booked better, we would have had a better experience.
Even though we didn't have the best experience, I would still rate the park maybe a 3 out of 5 because the park was pretty, it has camping, hiking, boating, fishing, swimming, etc..It was just way too busy for us. We like our parks not super busy.
