When we started planning this spring trip, we had originally planned to leave West Memphis and journey through western Tennessee. But then friends that we haven’t seen since Covid invited us to join them for a long weekend in early May at a campground in Missouri. Our motto since Covid, is just say “yes.” Spending time with friends comes first. So instead, we worked our way back up along Highway 67 and decided to stop in the area of Fredericktown, Missouri. I had been by there so many times but never actually stopped in the area since childhood. Wow, we were missing out.
We were excited to be staying at another Harvest Host location called Midwest Van Builder where they are doing custom van build outs. If we ever decided to go in that direction, this is the place I would recommend. Johnny and her friends are doing amazing work there. We met another couple from New Mexico and it was a special one-night stop.
Not far away was Fredrock Glamping. This is a great stop if you don’t have an RV as there are really cool glamping rentals. The owner is a mother-daughter duo and as soon as we arrived, she gave us a tour of the place in her ATV. The property sits on Twelve Mile Creek and has its own shut-ins. I was blown away at the beauty just a short walk from the 5 RV campsites.
We took a day trip to visit Silver Mines Campground which we agreed should be a future camping destination. The campground has electric hookups and since it is in Mark Twain National Forest, it is bookable on Recreation.gov. Because of all the rain we were having the river was high enough that kayakers were putting in upstream at Millstream Gardens and finishing up the Class III rapids at Silver Mines. It was fun to watch and the paved trail to the look out at Millstream was a really nice walk. Our neighbors at home are kayakers and it was fun to see what they do.
Another day, we visited the Castor River shut-ins which are gorgeous pink granite shut-ins. All the rain certainly made everything scenic. But the last two days at Fredrock brought such rain that the road to the tent sites at Fredrock was washed out.
We had a bit of reprieve the day we left but more rain was to come.
