Although nearly a month has gone by since this event actually happened, I still feel like it is worthy of a blog post so that we can look back on it and remember our July 4th weekend.
Let's just suffice it to say that it was NOTHING....NOTHING at all like we had planned.
Ever since we decided to get the camper, I have been excited to go to Poe Valley for a weekend with it. Somehow all of my camping memories as a kid are wrapped up inside that little park, and I just knew my Pap would be smiling from Heaven knowing we were there. So, we decided July 4th was the time to go. We booked our site, packed up the camper and were so excited to get there.
There was a storm that was predicted for that afternoon, but we opted to leave around 1:00 (the plan had been for 12:00) to go in, get set up and hopefully not be doing all of the hooking up/setting up in the midst of a storm. As we travelled, we could see very ominous clouds all around us, and we drove through heavy rain for a period of 10 minutes or less, but it never stormed where we were. No signs that we ought to turn back and reconsider. So, as we were coming down the mountain about 100 yards from Dick Cramer's camp on the black top road, traffic stopped. And we sat. For about an hour and a half, we waited for someone who could come and remove a tree that had fallen in the roadway.
Once we were finally moving again, we told the kids how proud of them we were for their patience and got them all excited because we were only 2 miles away from the park. Big mistake. We got about a mile down the road (a skinny road, might I add) and traffic stopped suddenly again. This time, it was a big tree. With power lines tangled in it. In other words, we were going nowhere.
There was no way to turn ourselves and the camper around. One person in front of us tried to do it, and ended up scraping the bottom of his camper horribly. So it appeared we would be here for a while. To complicate matters we were low on gas and were concerned that we needed to really save the battery power of the camper, not knowing how long we might need to run off of battery/propane to keep our food cold, etc. So, we opened up the camper (not the slideouts) and let the kids and I get in to find some activities to occupy us. We were hopeful that we might get moving--- that was until the electric workers came through to tell us that this was a bad one, and we needed to wait for the big trucks to come through to handle it. We were supposed to get comfortable.
In the meantime, traffic was piling up behind us. It was a holiday weekend after all. And so the lineup just kept lining up.
Before too long, Jason and I were standing outside talking and he said that he thought he saw Zig coming down the road. I was sure he was hallucinating because Lib and Zig had said they wouldn't be coming in to see us until the next day. But sure enough, there he was. And with Libby and the girls with him. Although I wasn't glad that they were now also stuck with us, at least we had company! Believe me when I tell you that our kids really needed a distraction. They were tiring quickly of all the things I had for them to do in our squished, hot tin can.
After about 3.5 hours and a whole lot of trucks/workers, they were able to clear the tree from the roadway and we started moving again. We had already been warned, though, that there were additional trees down, so this movement was going to be short lived. But we were trapped, truly. All we could do was to ride this whole thing out and hope for the best. We made the turn into the park and just barely cleared a tree that was down diagonally between two others. This one was later cleared because it wasn't very stable. We know that because we sat in our new spot for another 3.5 hours waiting for someone to clear another tree with power lines from across the bridge. We had been told that the park was a disaster area- trees down everywhere, no electricity, no working sewer, etc.
Around 10:30, the park rangers came around to tell us that they were going to have to close the park for the night, and were suggesting that we just camp along side the road for the night. Jason opted to ask for an opportunity to turn around, and they obliged us by clearing some barracades and trees so that we could make it to the one safe spot to turn around. The challenge, though, was squeezing our camper back up through the lineup of holiday weekend campers. I swear, if there was 3 inches between our camper and the sides of the other ones we passed, we were lucky.
We called my parents when we hit the top of the mountain and asked if we could crash there for the night. Exhausted and frustrated, we pulled in there around 11:30. We were so grateful that it worked out the way that it did, although everyone was upset that our weekend wasn't working out the way we had planned for it to go.
This will be one we'll remember for quite some time!
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