DeSoto State Park Campground — Hotel in Fort Payne

Bottom line - this was a great place to camp for a few days. Now for the details. Due to COVID-19, the office called us while we were enroute and offered telephone check-in. We accepted and that worked very well. We simply drove to our site and hooked up. Most of the camp sites have a good bit of room between them, which is very nice. All of the utilities at our site worked well. There were a number of hiking trails (22 miles according to the trail guide) with hikes varying from less than a 1/2 mile to several miles in length, and difficulty ranging from fairly easy to fairly moderate. The pool was closed due to COVID-19. There are a number of other sites and recreation activities available in the area. The only down side is that several of the sites, including ours, were not very level. The front wheels of our motorhome were literally 6" off the ground. Still, that's a small price to pay for the beauty of the Northeast Alabama mountains. The only other caution I would mention for someone who has never been here is that this is on top of a mountain, and you have a long (about 1.5 miles) steep (about 7%) climb from Fort Payne to get to the top of the mountain. It's no problem if you are prepared, but if you are in a large RV, expect to practice your mountain driving skills. Our final day, we woke to find a small heard of deer sleeping just outside our bedroom window. Now that you won't get in any hotel. We'll...

We had a wonderful time at this park. There were several sites camping but it was a quiet experience. The sites were nice and spacious and not too close to each other. Each site had a natural barrier and most sites had shade. If you come in late, be sure to call ahead and get the gate code. We arrived after 7 pm and the gate was down. We called the number listed and after a long time, to our relief, someone answered the phone and gave us the gate code. This park has several things to do for everyone. We wanted hiking and they have several trails there. Desoto Falls is not far and we chose the fall hike to the bottom of the falls. I have a review of that like also. Be forewarned, cell service is sketchy and basically non existent in this area, so be sure to download any maps onto your device before coming into this area. You will not regret it. We also visited one town while there, Mentone. I would definitely...

The campground was very nice, clean... The Mountain Inn Restaurant was terrible. I ordered a steak, potato & veggie. Veggie was very good, potato was good but bearly warm. The steak was extremely fatty & hard to chew. I actually started choking & had to dislodge meat from throat! My husband ordered salmon, veggie & potato. The salmon was extremely dried out, appeared to be precooked frozen patty. His potato was cold and couldn't even melt butter on it. It came with fried hash brown type of something that was so hard he couldn't bite it. The waitress was extremely nice & polite. She asked how it was, we explained all this, she was going to tell her manager. We never saw a manager. She came back with bill & didn't adjust it according to leftovers on the plates. Very disappointing. Save $ and eat somewhere else. 3 stars is average between 5 star camping & 1...