Payne Lake – Talladega National Forest
April 6th and 7th ~ Day 7 & 8 of our 2015 Road Trip
Soon after we started this adventure I found out that you could park pretty much anywhere in a National Forest for
free and spend up to 14 days, so I have wanted to skip from one to the next in our travels. It sounded good but I have never been able to make it work, specially in the east. When we were planning our departure from the south this time, the NFS map made it look promising.
So we are working on it. we spent the weekend of the 4th in the Tuskegee NF and then put 149 miles on the Minnow on the 6th to arrive at Payne Lake in the Talladega National Forest. It pretty much poured rain most of the drive so we were glad to get there, the first thing inside the gate was the dump station which we were in dire need of and the reason we forced ourselves to go so far in one day :P
The website had said that the more primitive campground on the east side of the lake was closed which I thought meant we were going to use it free but when we arrived they had a sign asking for $3 for the night, bummer that is not good for the budget.
Lei’s Chair
We circled a couple of times looking for a levelish spot and ended up in #28 which wasn’t that great, sometimes we think that the more you pay the worse the spot. It was so unlevel the fridge wouldn’t fridge so we went out looking again and we ended up parking in the abandoned beach parking lot the second night. It rained the whole time but that didn’t stop the mosquitoes.
But even having to pay a total of $6 for the 2 nights, we got our tanks dumped and our fresh water filled, out in the southwest that can cost a lot more than that.
Show on map
It was a fine place to stop just over priced. Pretty close to west, no playin around