North Carolina RV Parks: The RV parks in North Carolina You Want to Visit!

RV parks in North Carolina are in particularly good supply where you probably need them most; in the eastern portion of the state near where it rises to meet the border with Tennessee. North Carolina RV parks are particularly important in this neck of the woods because this is Great Smoky Mountains National Park country, and the North Carolina RV parks here help support the tourists who come literally by the millions to visit this beautiful national park.

It was the national park that drew my wife and me to this part of North Carolina early in the spring -- mid-April -- in the midst of a 30,000-mile adventure that we undertook in search of our country and of ourselves. The trip is recounted in my book, In Search of America’s Heartbeat: Twelve Months on the Road. We selected a site in a nearly empty RV park in the foothills of the Smokies where we spent an enjoyable week.

The  RV park we stayed at  was:

Winngray Family Campground outside of Waynesville. It proved to be a great place to use as a base for visiting Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This RV park provided paved interior roads and 120 sites for travelers, half of them gravel and half of them grass, 50 of them pull-throughs, 100 with full hookups, the rest with water and electric. The RV park also provided cable TV, laundry room and LP gas sales. Fishing and swimming were available in-season in Jonathan Creek, which runs alongside the RV park.

We arrived before the tourist season really started, and the RV park was virtually empty. So was the national park, which was nice; no traffic, no crowds, no problems. Waynesville is a fascinating place. It claims to be the site of the last shot fired in the Civil War east of the Mississippi River, an event that occurred sometime after the surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee on April 9, 1865 at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. A few miles outside of Waynesville is Cold Mountain, of Hollywood movie fame. The author of the book on which the movie was based came from these hills, and built that Civil War story on the bitter historical experience of this place.

If you’re considering exploring the Great Smokies and any North Carolina RV parks, I hope you’ve found these observations helpful. If you know of any other RV parks in North Carolina that I should add to this list, e-mail me at searchforamerica@msn.com

To read a great book about life on the road, including my travels through some of the great RV parks of the Southeast, grab your copy of In Search of America’s Heartbeat: Twelve Months on the Road.