I and the folks from the riding stable I board my horses at recently took our first out of state camping trip and decided to go to Love Valley, NC which is the self proclaimed "cowboy capital" of the country and a "horseman's paradise" and why we decided to go because looking at the website it looked really neat. When we pulled into the area, I looked around and prayed that what I was seeing wasn't Love Valley but it was. The place is an absolute trash hole. There are hundreds of permanent, cheap, redneck campers with permanent roofs attached to them. They're an eye sore and there are so many of them. They're campers meant to live in for a weekend or so, but the people in the town live in them permeate. There are large piles of construction material and trash everywhere, not like in a small discreet area, but on the sides of roads and in front of houses and in front of stores, it's like they were just too lazy to put the stuff up. There was a pile of discarded toilets in one lot and in another a giant pile of wood, bedsprings, and metal that was burnt to a crisp. One of the "bathhouses" was literally a shack with a water hose and 2 black barrels on the roof which served as the "hot water heater". The bathrooms and bath houses were a nightmare. Our bathhouse was a little shack that hadn't been cleaned in god knows when. There were used razors and soap in the shower from the last campers. The floor had 3 inches of dirt on it and the toilet seat was covered in dead moths. The pipes were rusty and made the water smell horrible, so you literally smelled worse coming out then in. To really drive the nail home, there was no hot water. We called and complained and the "employees" said they would fix it, but they blatantly lied to us about it, they had no intention of fixing it and gave us a lie about needing an electrician, but we knew that was a lie because one of the riders with us was an experienced electrician. I don't think the bath house has ever had hot water. They let us use another bath house, I was the first to use it and when I pulled back the shower curtain, there was a nest of spiders in the bottom and ceiling and along the sides. I killed about 6 spiders and had one of the most paranoid showers of my life. The toilet was full of dead beetles. The place hadn't been washed in god knows when and they were too lazy to put down bug spray and the place was infested with spiders and bugs. The town was billed as an "old western" town but in fact was a ghost town. It had a total of 5 stores, 2 of which were for sale. There were no restaurants, no decent stores. The closest restaurant was 14 miles away and was literally a Citgo gas station with a fryer. There were no fast food chains, not even a McDonald's. We had to drive 30 miles for a sit down restaurant. The nearest grocery store is 25 miles away. There were 2 bars in the town which were called "saloons" but were really run down bars that blared music across the campsite at night. Our camp site was next to a busy road, there were a lot of diesel trucks and a lot of drunk horse riders. I was too often woken at 3 am by drunken cowboys riding by and yelling. There aren't any cops and rules aren't followed there and there’s a lot of public drunkenness. The trails are all on the road and there are no "forest trails". Oh and the town is racist. Coming into the camp site there was a permanent resident trailer with a "porch monkey" on the porch, which was a little black man dressed in a pet monkey suit, eating watermelon with exaggerated "black" features. It was disgusting. Also one of our riders was black and they were very rude and unfriendly to him. It's billed as a "Christian cowboy" retreat, more like they're all a bunch of backward racists. The place was just a HUGE disappointment and dirty and racist and run down and poorly managed and just crappy. Go somewhere else to ride your horses, we would have had much more fun if we had stayed local or went to a national/state park. This place isn't worth the money to get there. I think 40 years ago it was a "cool" place, but now it's a dump. Stay away.
0 comments