Sweetwater Campground, Georgia

March 14-23, 2025

I arrived at Sweetwater Campground on Friday, March 14. I stayed ten nights. I had originally found Sweetwater in my Army Corp of Engineers guidebook. Sweetwater is on Lake Allatoona, near the town of Canton, Georgia. I mentioned Allatoona to some neighbors when I was at Fort Pickens (Florida) back in January. They lived in the Atlanta area and had been to some of the campgrounds on the lake as well as another, Lake Sidney Lanier. They said they were great places.

My original plan, on this trip, was to head to the Asheville area.  I planned to do some bike riding on the Blue Ridge Parkway, something I had done back in the early 2000s a few times on my way to Great Smokey Mountains NP. I also wanted to spend some time exploring downtown Asheville and the River Arts District.

I learned from my friend Linda that much of the Blue Ridge was still closed, due to damage from Hurricane Helena, especially areas north of Asheville. I skipped by Asheville and came south to this place as a result. I’ll stop in Asheville on my way north in the coming days.

Upon arriving here at Sweetwater, I learned that it had just opened for the season this very week. There are about 150 campsites, but only about 20 were occupied. The park is massive and most of the campsites are spread far apart. There is plenty of privacy in most cases. The campground and lake imparted a feeling of calm. It was quiet, peaceful, and inviting. It was easy to be solitary, to be alone with my thoughts and feelings in a beautiful nature environment, walking along the camp road or sitting in my chair overlooking the lake.

I want to be clear that I like people, but I like not having a lot of them around at times, too. Meeting new people is great. Social life, as it is in the traveling world, is what you make of it. I often reach out to people, striking up conversations. Everyone has a story, and the majority are enjoyably interesting, especially when they speak from the heart about their life experiences. It can be a time of considerable reflection. And fun.

There were two sets of camp hosts. One was a couple from Florida. They had three vehicles: a SUV, a Rialto Camper, and a Class A. Rialtos were made in the 1990s and early 2000s on VW bus chassis, similar to the VW Eurovan, only larger. Class A RVs are the type that look like actual buses. The other hosts were two women from Texas. They had a really nice pickup truck and a large fifth-wheel camper with USA and Texas flags displayed from it. They were all quite welcoming and helpful. I stopped and talked with them a few times at the park’s registration building.

There were no good roads for cycling in the area. The main road to the campground is Route 20. It has no shoulders, lots of curves, heavy traffic, and a 55-mph speed limit. I opted to not ride on it at all. I rode inside the park, riding from one end to the other, doing numerous repeats of a 2.6 mile loop on six of the ten days I was here, a total of 155 miles. These were good workouts in a nice, naturally scenic area. I’d prefer a different type of riding, out on open roads or on a long rail-trail, but this was the best option.

On my second day here, I met a young couple (20s) who were renting out their house while renovating an older RV trailer. The RV was at the woman’s mother’s house, not far from the campground. They were redoing the walls and ceiling, the electrical and plumbing, etc. They were taking it all apart and putting it back together, guided largely by YouTube videos. They planned to live in it and travel around the country. For the time being, the couple were enjoying the outdoor experience here via car camping. They surprised me later in the week by telling me they were changing plans. They were going to finish up some things on the RV and sell it, then they were going to head to Europe for a couple months this summer with backpacks and train passes.

One reason I ended up staying here ten days was due to an unexpected dental situation. Two nights before I left Danbury I had a little pain in my teeth overnight. The next day and night it was fine, and I did not give it much thought. On my second night of travel, while staying at Mane Gait Equestrian Center in Virginia, it acted up again. By the end of the week, it grew worse. I was taking ibuprofen day and night. My dentist in Danbury gave me a prescription for antibiotics. The day after I started the antibiotic, things improved greatly. I still had significant pain each day, each time the ibuprofen wore off, but it was much better than it had been.

I found an endodontist in Canton, about ten miles from Sweetwater. He had over twenty years’ experience and excellent reviews on three different review sites. I saw him on the morning of Wednesday, March 19.

At first, things were reassuring. The endodontist told me he was 100% sure tooth #3 needed a root canal. He could do the root canal in one session, even putting a final filling in the tooth. I was glad to hear it. He gave me Novocain started to work on it, etc.

I’ve had several root canals before. None of them were painful. This was an exception, despite lots of Novocain!  

The situation went from bad to worse. He could not find the shaft (canal?) that houses the tooth’s root. No root means unable to do the root canal. He drilled and looked, said he went deep and could not find it. He stopped because he said after looking for nearly an hour, he needed a break. Those were not his exact words, but that’s how I read it. “It’s like looking for a dot in a tiny circle,” was what he told me. The inference was that looking for it is a demanding activity, and taking a break, then coming back to it, would seem fresh. I could understand that.

On one hand, walking away for a time from an intense activity is fine. It gives perspective perhaps. On the other, it was not professionally reassuring that he talked this way, especially when he asked if I could come back NEXT TUESDAY so he could continue. An entire week would pass, and I’d be in whatever pain and discomfort there was to be had. I did not have any more favorable options. I could look for another endodontist or I could drive back to Danbury and see someone locally. Neither idea sounded attractive. I agreed to come back next Tuesday. Before I left, he had Nikita, his assistant, take another 360-degree scan of the tooth.

Minutes later, I was sitting in my van, still outside the office, and Nikita called me. She said the doctor had looked at the second scan she had taken, and he wanted me to come back today at 4:15 if possible. I did, and he easily found the canal within a couple minutes of work. He still had a difficult time with it, the process took about an hour, but he said he got it done and it looked good. I hoped that were true.

After the Novocain wore off, it was still very painful. Ibuprofen did not help much. Overnight, I could not sleep, so I took some Hydrocodone with acetaminophen he had prescribed at my request, as I was not sure ibuprofen would provide enough pain relief. That helped a great deal, and I was able to sleep. The pain lessened the next day, and on the second day it was almost absent.

The experience has tainted my experience of this trip, but I am hopeful that is the end of it, that it continues on a healing track. Whew!

This experience had me searching Google for solutions. One thing I found was the topic of dental tourism. People can go to another country to have dental work done at a fraction of the cost in the United States, some places over 50% less expensive. Molar City, Mexico is touted as the the was one of the main destinations. In an article in Forbes, Thailand is high on the list, with most of the practices located in Bangkok. That’s an interesting idea. Travel to Bangkok for two months and have any major dental work done there, whatever “it” would be. Hungary, too. Hungary may be more practical. Germany for dental work?

There was other excitement, too. There was a tornado watch Sunday night (March 16). All day, the weather forecast said rain and high winds (20 mph) were going to be prevalent through the night. Actually, all day Friday the forecast called for rain all day Saturday, but the rain never showed up until after it was dark. I looked at the forecast again, around 9PM Saturday night, and that is when I saw tornado watch for this area. I guess I should have known the storms coming over from the west, Alabama and Mississippi, might continue with turbulent activity. There were bad tornadoes there with around twenty people dead as a result.

It turned out there was no tornado. It never moved into “warning” mode, which would mean go to cover. I was proactive. The only “shelters” in the park are the bathrooms. They have concrete block construction. The closest one to my campsite is about a half mile away. I was not going to enjoy moving there if there was a warning siren at 1AM. It would be pouring rain with strong winds gusting to 35-40 mph according to the forecast. I decided I would just drive there and park, spend the night right outside the bathroom, so if it happened, I’d be right there.

But it never happened. There was wind and rain, there was lots of lightning and thunder, but no sirens and no tornadoes.

Other than that, the weather here has been great. There was lots of sunshine and most days the temperature reached the 60s or 70s. Overnight there was still a chill.

The population of the campground increased over the weekend from about twenty occupied sites to around seventy. The noise level increased, too, as there are always a few sites where it seems people are here to party. They play loud music. In my experience, it is usually country or rap, and these people seem to have little concern for other campers. I could hear the base beat coming from one campsite. I took a walk that night and found the source. It was about three hundred yards from where I first started hearing it.

There were a lot of birds! Here’s my list compiled over the ten days, forty different species.

American Crow                                        American Goldfinch                American Robin

Belted Kingfisher                                     Blue-headed Vireo                   Blue Jay

Brown Creeper                                         Brown-headed Nuthatch              Brown Thrasher

Canadian Goose                                      Carolina Chicadee                   Carolina Wren

Chipping Sparrow                                   Dark-eyed Junco                       Downy Woodpecker

Eastern Bluebird                                      Eastern Phoebe                         Eastern Towhee

Fish Crow                                                   Golden-crowned Kinglet              Great Horned Owl

Hairy Woodpecker                                  Hermit Thrush                            House Finch

Killdeer                                                        Mourning Dove                          Northern Cardinal

Northern Flicker                                       Northern Mockingbird              Osprey

Pine Warbler                                              Red-bellied Woodpecker              Red-winged Blackbird

Ruby-crowned Kinglet                           Song Sparrow                             Swamp Sparrow

Tufted Titmouse                                       White-breasted Nuthatch              Yellow-rumped Warbler

Yellow-throated Warbler