We visited Oxford in March 2016 as part of Big Trip #1.

Camping Lessons Learned

This one was a doozy. When parked on a decline, make sure those wheel chocks are tight on the trailer wheels, or your trailer could shift downhill ever so slightly and the hitch jack could fall off the leveling blocks and crash several inches to the ground–thankfully not causing any damage, but terrifying the human and canine inside the trailer at the time, and necessitating some creativity when it’s time to get the hitch ball under the now much lower trailer coupler. It all worked out, but jeez.

Campground

We stayed at the John W. Kyle State Park Campground, on Sardis Lake, about a 20-minute drive from downtown Oxford. It’s a lovely campground, with sunsets over the Lower Lake, big shade trees, and on weekdays in early March, not many guests at all. We set up our “yard” for the first time in our spot near the lake, with a fence for Bugsy (she quickly figured out that she could just go under the trailer to exit if she really wanted to, but it generally did its job), camp chairs, the sink cover from the Airstream as a beverage table, and our fancy ground mats, and watched the sunset and listened to the frogs. There’s no wifi, and phone service is spotty.

Activities

Walk around Courthouse Square in Oxford, and the campus of Ole Miss, admiring the architecture and students.

Get some exercise on the nature trail and fitness trail near the dam at Sardis Lake. The trails can be combined to make a really pleasant run, meandering through the woods near the Lower Lake campgrounds. The trails are on the right on this map.

Eating and Drinking

We started with coffee and wifi at High Point Coffee, on their dog-friendly patio.

Then we put Bugsy in the car and had lunch at Ajax Diner on the Square. Delicious, good service, funky diner interior. For a soul food joint, they do a great salad–still soul food with smoked catfish.

Last stop before leaving town was The Growler, sharing the same dog-friendly patio space with High Point Coffee, for a local beer. There are no breweries in Oxford, but The Growler has a good selection of regional beers on tap. I had a Suzy B blonde ale from Southern Prohibition Brewing, Hattiesburg, MS, and J had a Game Day IPA from Tin Roof Brewing, Baton Rouge, LA.

We discovered this random dive bar on Monday, our last day in town, and they were closed. It’s just a few minutes from the campground, would have been fun to check out!