We’ve moved from a woodsy, serene, and quiet environment to a hopping spot at Lake Monroe Village Resort. Fortunately, we were given a choice of sites and selected the “quiet” one, but that’s a relative term. We have golf carts going by every 5 minutes it seems. Looking back, this park is the first place we encountered a place that caters primarily to extended stay sites. We’d never stayed anywhere like this before, so the quality of the landscaping at many of the sites and the number of golf carts zipping around were a new experience!
That said, it WAS the weekend when it arrived on August 5, 2017. It did quiet down on Monday. I get the impression that lots of people are set up here long term for its proximity to Lake Monroe. Instead of having a lake cottage, people have an RV near the lake. Having visited – well, 18 campgrounds this trip – this is the swankiest. Lots of beautifully landscaped and “decked-out” sites.
In fact, we have a fancy concrete site with a flower garden. Here’s our front “lawn” which includes a fire ring plus a flower garden. And a view of the woods.
Here’s our side yard… we get this view from the sofa-side window.
Sitting on our front patio – this is our view. Granted we get traffic every few minutes along the road there but.. compared to other sites, I like this view. Hoping we’re just experiencing weekend traffic.
The trails are a definite plus here… our experience to date with park trails has been limited, but most are short and not well-maintained. Probably because they are not worth using. Here we’ve discovered just one of the trails… we wound up walking almost 3 miles round trip.
At the end of the trail is a lake.
It’s really a lake… not a pond. And um… no corn in sight.
In fact, it’s a really big lake… I hear there’s boat rentals somewhere. After hanging out in woods only a while, it’s nice to have some water to enjoy! In the woods even!
They have plenty of room for tent camping here too, plus cabins. Park is 200 acres! And 425 sites! Anyway, despite the “suburban living” feel to our site, this place has something for everyone and is very well-maintained.
After the busy-ness of the weekend here, it was downright eerie during the week. Super quiet. Our guess is that 95% or higher of the people left on Sunday night. As we suspected, they leave their RVs and boats here for (insert duration here) and visit on weekends. We’re not the only ones left behind- we walked around to see. But there are very few! Anyway, some of the sites/sights that caught our eye…
For example, this RVer must really like flamingoes… I couldn’t get all of them into one shot.
This place looks cool. Sharp looking RV, big lawn and tended garden, and cool cabana and fencing.
This is our neighbor across the street. That is in fact a trailer… it just looks more like a house. The term is destination trailer… they’re not made to move around as we do. Huge deck and beautiful furniture over there. They also had a drone out yesterday. I wanted to go ask if I could fly it!
Me: Man, that dog is super chill. Sitting so calm like that all day. Dean: It’s not real. Me: Oh…(had to go look closer).
Wine Tasting!
We figured we should investigate why Oliver is touted as the #1 winery in Indiana today. And we learned a lot.
It turns out Professor Oliver – a law professor – had a wine hobby in the 60s that took off. The only problem was it was illegal to sell wine directly to consumers. So he got a law passed to fix that. However, that law set a cap on production. When they reached that limit, Oliver got another law passed with a higher limit. And maybe two more. So they were the first (legal) winery in Indiana and today significantly outproduce all the other wineries in the state put together.
Many of the wines we tasted today were good, too, although some were meh. They use some locally grown grapes, but they also buy from California growers. We went on a very informative tour of the facility and sampled wines in a very busy tasting room. But it was definitely worth the visit.
We had a tasting of eight wines – all dry reds – and that was maybe 1/4 of the available wines. This would be a lovely place to spend an afternoon on a sunnier day.
Lake Monroe
We also checked out Lake Monroe at Paynetown State Recreation Area. This would be a fun place to have a boat!
Indianapolis KOA, here we come!
