#323 Old Corundum mill site campground Franklin NC August 1 till October 15

One of the things that we decided is whenever we slowed down if you're going to be full-time RV and it's 95 degrees or something and why don't you just leave? This was definitely the plan so we started thinking about the mountains of North Carolina as being a perfect match. Since everything changed with our plan to stay in Wilmington over the summer I started looking around for a site. I started with Asheville I guess but I was very open to about anything that was cool in the summer

We started looking around and you know there's always Brevard which would have been great. There's Davidson River campground there and that's a national forest but you have to figure in it's a 14-day max thing. I wanted to stay the whole summer so I thought about hosting somewhere. I started looking for what's available that checks all our boxes. There are about 5 things that have to be present for us to have a long stay. One, is there a UU? is there water like a river or lakeside? It must be pretty, four; we need a movie theater nearby, five; I need a hardware store of some sort. There were some places near Asheville that were possible and they had everything required but it was beginning to look like it would have to be a private campground. There would be no real option of doing a state or national park unless there was a hosting job.

I decided to look over towards where my sister lives in Franklin North Carolina so we can visit some. I called a few places and either there was no vacancy or this or the other. Soon I found a place and he said well it sounds good then he said so like exactly how long are you and I said well I'm in a 40-foot 5th wheel. He said that’s not going to work, I just can't handle anything ever about 32 ft. He said but I do know a guy that can probably accommodate you if you want to give him a call and so I did and the name of this place was Old Corundum. It was an old kind of a family-run RV park and it was right on the Cullasaja river.

This river flows from Highlands all the way down to Franklin and then becomes the Little Tennessee River at some point. They say by the time it gets down to Franklin it's getting a little bit stagnant and a little less than desirable. Up where we are the water that runs off the mountain and very clean and wonderful. I called the guy and he said you know as it turns out I have one site available for the period or asking about which would be August through October. He actually said I can only guarantee you right now one month if you want it and the only spot I've got. It was number 23 or something like that and it's not right on the river. I got to thinking, it's not perfect but I'll take it. He actually said something else interesting. He said give me a deposit and if you get up here and you don't like it I'll give you money back with no issues. That's kind of hard to beat so I said okay and we did the deal. I was kind of thinking about how I could do some wheeling and dealing when I get there my sight is less than desirable. Apparently, it's just over behind the office / mini store, and nothing to look at. Maybe I could offer a guy that's on the river some money to trade. I'll take your site that's right on the river if you take my less than perfect site and I'll give you $100 more a month. That was my plan. When we arrived it reminded me of a nice trailer park, but everybody there was elderly and it seemed safe. Some trailer parks are particularly bad when they're run down and full of all crazy people flying their confederate flags and their Trump is wonderful and skinning deer out in the front yard.

These are things that I'm not too excited about, but it wasn't like that. Mostly all elderly people and they all were very nice and friendly and we paused at the office to check in, As we pulled up and talk to the manager he said you know something just changed and I can put you into this site right here that's riverfront with an amazing view if you’re interested. Everything about it was absolutely wonderful. He said I can only do it for one month. The people just canceled if you want it and I said of course

We were very happy and settled in. One afternoon India and I were sitting in chairs right on the river and saw some butterflies all gathered in a group on the bank. I couldn’t figure it out as it seemed like they were licking nectar off the sand. Maybe they were in an insect strategy meeting bit. Maybe they had been out collecting nectar all day and now they are gathering sharing notes and talking about what the day was like and chewing the cud so to speak. I just thought it was cool. After a while, the cat chases them off but till then it was a really great moment.

I knew we had to leave in September so I was kind of looking around. I saw a sign out on the road advertising two riverfront sites. and it was right up the road. We met with the landlord and he was beyond friendly they were so nice they even said we could use their Wi-Fi. The price was great it was like 500 it was it was just fine. The downside is he said yeah there's a trailer over there that used to be full of methheads and that was kind of creepy. Then he said I've got a beaver down there by the river and if you can kill it, thank you very much. I looked around and there was a leg trap set. I thought that sucks because I don't like animals being trapped and suffering chewing their legs off and such so that kind of was a definite turn-off. One other item was you didn't really have access to the river without going over down a really steep hill. Naturally, I was going to go ahead and remodel the whole thing at no expense building a deck stretching out over the river. It wasn't perfect but it was very much better than nothing at all. I told the guy I could put down a deposit and he said just give me your phone number and show up in September and that will be fine. In the days to follow the manager at Old Corundum river said hey man if you want to keep your site all the way to October, you can have it. This was good but then I had to go back and tell the other nice people we didn't need the site anymore. I felt bad about doing that but that's what happened. I can only hope he found a renter so no harm was done. It was great to have a perfect riverfront site that you can't beat with a stick and we had the good fortune of staying there.

When we had stayed at Franklin for three nights a few months prior we found a UU in Franklin and was a surprise. It's such a conservative part of the world but that's great so that checks one of our boxes. We began to attend each Sunday. We went on a walk every other day for 2 miles on many of the various trails about the county. Sometimes we would go up towards Georgia which was only 30 minutes away. Sometimes we would go up towards Highlands or the river walk right down in Franklin. We hiked the Bartram trail going towards Georgia near a town called Otto. I took a lot of pictures on our hikes and we also went to many waterfalls and all that was cool.

Bartram Trail

I would say we just completely embraced Franklin. I mention my Sister Sheila lives here and her hubby Wesley are ministers at the Watauga Baptist Church up on the hill. Their brand of religion is a little bit more stern than I care for but she's my sister and I love her bunches. She would probably say my brother does some liberal milk toast faith but I love him bunches. We went out to dinner with them like twice a week and mentioned I could volunteer a little bit at Watauga. They were cleaning up in the basement as they had a water leak that messed everything up. Because of mold concerns they needed to haul it all off and get the walls sanitized and rebuild. They were all very cool people and I just enjoyed being able to spend some time with my sister and family up there. I did a ceiling fan job for my brother-in-law Wesley.

The strangest thing happened while we were visiting Franklin. Wesley went to take one of the parishioners up to Asheville for a procedure of some sort and while he was in the waiting room for them to have surgery he felt pretty lousy himself. He didn't know quite what to do so they said well you could check yourself in. Sure enough, he was in bad shape there was some sort of a heartbeat irregularity going on. Arrhythmia I believe it's called. You know that’s a serious check engine light and I mean it was touch and go for a while. My sister was right by his side because this is some big bad scary stuff. In about a week he recovered and tried to get back to a new normal. A month or so prior he had some internal bleeding and he had found out he has diverticulitis.

Even though he looks good on the outside he had a tough stretch there for a while. He said Lord they put him on like on like 9 medicine and that's not any fun. He shared that because of his faith he was fine with death but it surprised him that when he couldn’t breathe his survival instinct desired to live, to make it. I think this means our mind says live or die I don’t care because I’ll be in heaven. Our physical body says you will fight with all you have you must survive. He was very honest to share this as it must have made him vulnerable to be so human.

I have talked a lot about getting a cat tracker collar and for reasons, I can't explain we just haven't done it yet. Bert has done some really crazy stuff about 10 different times in the last 3 months. After this next little session, we got the collar ordered and put it on and the problem has been solved but we needed to suffer a lot first.

About a month into our stay on the river Bert didn't come home for lunch. That's not a real big deal but then he didn't come home for 5 pm dinner and now we're concerned. We tried not to let it bother us but whenever he didn't show up at 9 p.m. or so now we're pretty sure he’s in trouble somewhere. I made sort of a command decision that I can't find him in the middle of the night and if he doesn't come home at all and he's not here tomorrow morning then it's entirely possible that he could have gotten hit by a car.

After waking up a little bit the next morning I put a hand towel in the backpack and I went out to look for Bert. If I found him dead hit by a car I would scoop him up in the towel and take him home on my back. If he has been hit by a car it's going to be really awful and I'm not going to want to pick him up with my bare hands. Armed with a towel and backpack to put him in because I can't carry a dead cat around I left to start looking. All this is very morbid but I did it knowing that it's entirely possible that that's what's going to happen. I left out of the campground and I went up and across the road and over the bridge and up that way and I probably we went for an eighth of a mile and then I came back and went a mile up another road and just calling for him and looking for him. I did this for at least an hour and did a lot of loops around looking at the underneath a lot of RVs. I told the manager at about 10 a.m. that I got a missing cat and that kind of stinks. He said we can keep an eye out for you. About an hour later Bert came bolting across the property and raced into the house. I said to myself what is going on there boy? I was very happy he was not dead but very confused about what in the world went on. He's in the house probably getting his wet food from India and I went and talked to the manager. He came up and said they were just kind of eyeballing around and they thought they heard something about two spaces over from us. They opened a hatch of one of the RVs and Burt came darting out. These people had left for 4 days and locked everything up and Bert had decided he would jump up inside their compartment to hang out. He got locked in there and they went out of town and didn't hear him and we didn't know either. That was obviously not too bright on his part. The interesting thing is they were going to come back for a day then after that, they were going to be gone for like 6 months That could have been a bad day if they the left and gone to another town with a stowaway cat in tow. After this event, I finally ordered and received the cat tracker collar, and now ever since we have never had a problem finding Bert so apparently it takes that much pain to do the right thing

Another day I was sitting down by the river by myself and I kept on noticing the river was collecting debris from falling leaves and this, in turn, was settling into the nooks and crannies causing the water not to flow in a pretty way. Sticks and small logs were gathering like a dam of sorts.

Years ago someone had created a rock dam. I wondered if there had been a water-driven mill here once and this was the foundation. It was also low enough to where the water flowed over for the most part and then there was one area where it was wide open with all the water flowing through. This is where people tubing and paddling could get through.

I decided one afternoon I needed to clean up the debris from the waterfall. I went out and I'm being quite careful not to trip and fall I went up to the water flow area and started removing all the debris that was collecting behind the rocks. I wanted to do this because when the water is flowing freely the water is nice and clear but when all the leaves are piling up behind the rocks creating a blockage the water becomes somewhat stagnant and I didn't like that. It took about an hour but it was done I thought my work was quite nice.

We were continuing our routine of walking every other day and our first attempt was a trail in Franklin. The trail will take you from one end of town to the other and follows along the Little Tennessee River.

It's about five miles long and we hiked sections of it in 2 Mile stretches. By the time we left Franklin, I believe we had walked all five miles.

One trailhead was over behind the library and it went down to the river. The first time we tried this trail we left the library parking lot and went over to the corner. I guess and it was really just a dirt road that went down towards a trail system and at this time it was a little bit warm I'd say 85°. It felt a little unpleasant to say the least to be just out exposed dirt road for a quarter mile or so and later we would learn there was a woodsy way to get there we would do that from then on. The dirt road intersected the trail system and there was a sign that said this was like the river route which would be different than the paved type civilized route.

It followed the bends of the river and we thought that was kind of cool.

I took some pictures of some really cool orange flowers and another other cool thing was how the canopy of the forest he made kind of a tunnel looking thing and it was a pleasure and shady to be there.

The section went on for about a half a mile and then we could stop at a park bench and watch the river go by for a minute that was kind of nice. The trail passed a community garden which I was really kind of impressed with. For a small-town Franklin really had it going on in a lot of ways. I'm assuming that you could drive your car down to the garden but I never explored how you would get there by car. You could come down and work your little plot. If we ever settle down for a minute I would want to be a member in a community garden like this planting vegetables and that kind of stuff.

I also noticed along this trek that they had a frisbee disc golf course and I know you're just a tiny bit about this because my brother Grant is heavily into that sport.

He's two years older than me and at certain time in the year sometimes I catch up a little bit and I’ll be 1½ years younger.

By the time we got to the community garden it was be about a mile it was time to turn back which would make it a two-mile walk. We went on just a little bit past the community garden to Noah Bridge and that was when we turned back.

When we got back towards the gravel road towards the library India decided she would kind of take the civilized way. I went ahead and decided to see if I can find another way back. She said although she got back quicker it was kind of a hot dry road. She wasn't so sure that that was the best idea but she got back everybody lived.

I decided to take the other fork left which was a bit of a chore. I went down a path through the woods that we would get to know better later. This was my first stab at it so it was just a little cat path going through the woods. It had lots of switch backs to get you up a hill. If I had it continued on the path it would have eventually taken me around to the back side of the library but I didn't know any of this at the time. I thought well I know about where I'm at so if I just go up that steep hill I'll pretty much be at the very far end of the library property.

I walked by like an old outbuilding it was kind of a shed roof sort of thing and maybe 20 feet wide by 30 feet long or something. It may have been a stable I'm not sure it looked a little bit more like a work area maybe an old wood shop or something. Maybe where someone had done some woodworking. I thought about it and realized this brand-new library was probably bought on land that was previously in old farm. This was just an old building that they had no reason to tear it down because it cost more money to tear it down and leave it alone. It seemed like it had had electricity there at some point so who knows but it was completely abandoned. It was kind of junky with a bunch of trash laying around.

I proceeded to go up this really steep hill which I mean it felt like 45 degrees and I got on up to the top and of course it flattened out because it's some point this adventure I was in the world created by bulldozers and motor graders.

As soon as I got to the top of a hill you could see the library far off in the distance but it was a large field of scrubby weedy kind of growth between me and the parking lot. I figured we'll this is no issue until I realized it's not beautiful flowing grass it's like briar's practically the whole way.

I typically wear gym shorts about all the time unless it's really cold and so this particular attire and thorny briars is not a great combination.

I pushed them down as best as I could to make a path but I did get all scratched up pretty nicely along my legs. By the time I got to the parking lot I was bleeding pretty nicely on both legs, just little scratches but it still kind of hurt like heck.

I got on back to where the truck was and India was planted there and we were both pooped and scratched up and it was time to head on back.

We walked segments of the city trail regularly and we parked in parking lots using various starting points.

For the most part I think this was okay but I really kind of prefer the trail system because it's woodsy with nature but the downside is its very difficult elevations and it works the heck out of you.

One of these trails was in Otto on the road that goes to Georgia.

We went down to that location because there was supposed to be a hydrologic laboratory that was just full of all kinds of trails but when we got there, we just couldn't quite figure out what they meant by trails. All we really found was a dirt road that would take you to all kinds of places including the Appalachian Trail if you stayed on it for 5 or 10 miles.

We walked up the road a mile and then walk back down to get our two in. The only problem is that there were a bunch of gnats that would not stop flying around our heads. There were like 10 of them that never stopped the whole time. I started using a small bushy limb section swatting myself something like a horse whips his tail all day.

They weren’t mosquitoes but they were really annoying and it made the walk less than wonderful.

During our summer India spoke to a lady named Diane who is a member of my sister's church. Diane is an elementary school teacher and India asked if she might be allowed to volunteer. India was approved and had a wonderful experience.

Several times a week I would take her by for1 /2 days.

The kids and Diane loved her and they all made thank you cards Here is one of the 30 some cards they made for her.

India melted when the kids gave her the thank you cards

Bartram and Rufus Morgan trail

One of the other Trails we did was Bartram. When we got to the trailhead itwas kind of a small dirt parking lot and we saw a national forest sign. It seemed like all of these trails just start climbing in elevation right away. We went by the nicest little waterfall early on and then we kept on going went to kind of a nice meadow where I got some cool pictures of some pretty flowers. It keeps on climbing and so since we knew that the thing was like a hundred miles long we just had to pick something to call it. The phone said that we've been about a mile so we just turned around and came back but it was a nice woodsy little walk and lots of nature. I have to say we really enjoyed it but the elevation is hard on your knees and legs and makes you a little tired.

Early on we went by the visitor center and asked a few questions. They gave us some maps and some ideas so we went to one called the Rufus Morgan Trail. It was kind of a bit of a drive and we went past something that was kind of cool looking created during the Great Depression and it was a CCC camp. It was later named the Lyndon Johnson CCC camp.

It was obviously a place for people to intern for a season or maybe it's a place where we train park rangers or both but I figured National Forest Service types have to be trained somewhere.

After leaving Franklin we probably drove what seemed to be 5 miles gently up the hill and then we went on forever and then finally we thought we were there but it was a national forest road Dirt Road it was another couple of more miles. When we actually got to the parking lot which is really just big enough for about three cars we were there and it was called the Rufus Morgan trail head.

The next set of pictures were all along that hike.

I saw this little frog and the advil shows how tiny he is

This is where people leave their neatly packaged dog poop in the national forest on the trail. They think the people from room service or the front desk will come by and pick it up.

I would say it was a good height but Miss India pointed out that it’s kind of creeped her out.

There was a certain pretty long stretches where it was just about the path the width of a foot and a half wide with a pretty big slope down like a drop off. Not a cliff but enough to where you would tumble and tumble and not like it.

There have been times when India lets me know that she has a little bit of a fear of heights. It's not like a cliff that you fall off of but just the idea of falling and breaking things doesn't turn her on. This trail didn’t sit well with her so we didn't do this one much. We went back once and hiked it backwards but she didn't really like it too much so not any more after that.

Except for that one section and the fact that it was a lot of elevation it was a good hike.

I believe they said it was a 1-mile loop but it felt like three because you really have to work.

We noticed that there was a creek right there at the trailhead and later we would find that as we got kind of towards the top of the hill, we were sort of following a waterfall from a stream. It was a really pretty waterfall that you can enjoy a little bit of a treat for your hard work.

On the opposite end of the world and we call this the Highlands hill. Its up on top of a hill and it has a wiggly windy road that they won't even let tractor-trailers go down because there too long to even make it around the curves. My brother-in-law Wesley said that sometimes the most stubborn try it and they have to go out there and rescue them because the tractor trailers are 50 feet long and they get hung up and can't get around the curves. They can't very well back down a hill for several miles. It's really considered a bad case of the stupid whenever this happens.

I was a little spooked about even going up here in my truck at first because the first time we did it was raining and I had slick tires so I didn't go all the way. I just said that okay we'll come back another day when it's not raining.

The second time I did it I got to thinking I had overreacted it wasn't that bad but I'll say coming down the hill on the way back home we used the Pacbrake which is an exhaust brake that I've had installed on the truck. It slows you down without using your brakes and it was very much needed to coming down that steep hill.

The place where we would park up that way was called Cliffside Campground and Recreation Area and there were a number of trails that you could pick up from this location.

The Cliffside area Recreation Area was actually pretty close to another prominent location that we went to and a lot of people go to called Dry Falls. Over to the left side of the road is Bridal Veil falls. It pretty much defines itself in that it's a very small little waterfall but when the winds blowing or whatever just right it looks like a veil.

I found out my turbo had a bad gasket and I fixed that one afternoon

The source of the Culasasia river is clearly on top of this mountain and down where we are at the RV park it's calms down a lot. A gently flowing river but when you up here are a very violent and fast-moving and goes over several waterfalls the people stop and look and take pictures of and hang out.

One of the biggest ones is called the Dry Falls and one afternoon we parked there and walked down and took lots of pictures. Because you can walk behind the waterfall that was a really nice afternoon and got lots of cool pictures.

This was also a bit of work out because of the whole lot of steps to get you back to the car.

Up at Cliffside we did several hikes. One of them towards the end of our visit. It was just a loop around the Cliffside Lake and it may be seem uneventful but you walk over behind a dam and that's interesting and then Lester spillway. You walk all the way around the lake and it's just very nature filled and we walked through campground where you don't have any facility and it's only big enough for a tent or a tiny camper but still a really beautiful place to visit. One thing that we noticed when we got there was a sign that said campground host. Just out of curiosity we went down and spoke to him a little. The dirt road that went down to their site was pretty steep and there's nowhere to turn around so once you got a big rig down there you would have to back up that hill when it's time to go.

Everything about hosting there would be beautiful and wonderful except for the logistics of getting in and out and even getting there.

It would fall into the category of being too much to go around those curves so it would have been terrifying going up that hill in my rig and then when you got there just terrifying going up and down that dirt road. You tell yourself I bet that would be a really good campground host job as well as beauty but I got to tell you man just really too much for my size rig.

I don't know how some people can do what they do but it would appear that this person was able to do everything I'm talking about in a really large full-size motorhome towing a car behind. I don't know if they're just more brave or more crazy or more willing but this is not something I would do.

Ranger Falls hike

The first big hike we did at cliffside was called Ranger Falls.

You start out at the trailhead and everything has elevation so you pull yourself along a very steep hill. You are going up the side of the mountain early so there's switchbacks and various things that make it reasonable. It seems like you work pretty hard for a section and then it flattens out to let you rest a little bit at least they try to make the trails not just one long straight climb up.

We get to a sign that says left turn Ranger Falls and we went ahead and took it and it was really just a chore from beginning to end. It's all fun and rewarding but it's just hard work so we trudge around through the woods for a while till we get to what they call Ranger Falls. It’s perfectly beautiful and I got some nice pictures and videos and such. Next you got it kind of drag yourself back up the hill as its a big loop and we were just about dead when we got to the top of that hill. Now it's just time to go back down the hill to your car which is easier than climbing but still going down a steep hill takes a bit of effort too. When we got done with the hike we looked at the step tracker on the phone and it ended up being about three and a half miles. We normally do two. I just would like to announce by the end of this hike we were really worn out. We would go down the main trail again but that Ranger Falls loop add on was probably more than we wanted to do twice.

We came to this Trailhead many times and on the second visit we time of just went straight up the road passing Ranger Falls. We walked up a mile and we went quite a ways about maybe a total hike of about three and a half miles. It was supposed to go up to the top of the hill kind of where you hit a road system and it was a neighborhood of nice houses. We did that one day. On another section a hike was a memorial to a ranger named Mr Potts.

I just thought this was a weird thing for a tree to do

We went up from that trailhead up past a really big stone memorial. They talked about his life and his accomplishments and contributions. We stayed on the trail and found ourselves way up on top of the ridge and then took a left and came on back down again. These are all very strenuous hikes we thought. We would go hiking every other day with a goal of two miles. Sometimes we did more but never less and again it was probably like double in calories because of the strenuous elevation stuff we had to go through.

In mid September I caught some sort of weird flu and I was down for about a week or unable to do much of anything and that kind of broke our habit of walking. One thing or the other got in the way and we can stopped walking for about a month. It's not great but that's what happened that kind of wraps up our trail walking part of this talk.

Old corundum Sandy/ Don River paddle

As soon as we got to Franklin we started attending the UU. From the beginning I was pleased there was a UU in such a conservative fundamentalist area. The first time we went to The UU service there was coffee hour afterwards. We went downstairs and I had coffee and India had hot tea and we nibbled. We just happened to sit down beside a nice lady who described yourself as Sandy and her husband Donn. They were just very easy people to talk to. When we told him that we were RV people, they said they had had a very similar experience.

They described how that they had retired and lived on a boat in about all around the Bahamas for about 7 years. Sandy talked about it was all very nice but when they got done, they really kind of done and it was kind of nice to have an actual house nowadays. They also mentioned that they spent about a year traveling in a campervan which was just a large van type small RV, if you will. Actually it was a Volkswagen with that lift up roof thing that makes a vented tent area, thing. It's the modern Volkswagen van. The child of the Microbus.

The only thing that struck me as odd as that they preferred not to camp in campgrounds because that cost money. They actually just kind of hid out in various neighborhoods after dark and because they were kind of just stealth camping, they rarely raised the roof of the van. I'm thinking like that's not my style but if that's what turns you on, good for you.

We would talk and visit with Sandy and Donn very regularly all the way through our visit. One night we went to The UU downstairs as in it was a family fun night kind of a game night and they had a big meal and various the board games. I should say a very strange interesting card game that blended narration from an app but the physical cards in front of you and it was all very cool.

They had mentioned kayaking and I mentioned kayaking so ended up doing an Excursion on two different times.

Our kayaking adventure consisted of India and I then Sandi and Donn and two another couples who actually had more of a wooden canoe. Man it was beautiful. We all paddled down the Cullasia and it would turn into the little Tennessee River or something like that maybe five miles down to where there was a dam and a spillway. We all followed Donn to leave cars at the end of the paddle and piled into one car to get back to the put in place at the beginning.

There always has to be some sort of drama with me, even if it's all unintentional.

We all put in begin to kayak. For India and I it was a two person kayak we bought from Costco. What I know now but did not know then was considering the way I store it under the RV when I'm traveling and if we go for real steep hill it appears that we were scraping the back part of the kayak on the asphalt. It's happened a couple of times and I wasn't that aware of it at all and it scraped the end of it to where it made a little hole which would then make you take on water.

After about 20 minutes or so I asked India why she was moving around in such a very annoying way back there.

She said I'm really not moving around that much and I said well it just seems like every time you wiggle back there the whole boat goes left or right so would you kind of take it easy.

This is an example of blaming your little bride whenever it's really not even her fault but that's what I did. After a few more minutes if it came even more wiggly and more unstable.I begin to say what is actually going on is this thing is taking on water. It was making a sloshing sound then unstable and weird. Next it looked like we were kind of low in the back and well next thing you know we rolled over and now we're all swimming.

Whenever these things happen in India becomes less like excited and more like wow Randall ,you really suck.

We were were able to swim and pull the kayak over towards land and we kind of used a tree log fallen tree to get the Kayak above water. In this way we could empty it of water and try again. The only real big problem is the whole area was mud and so you would go up to your knees in muck. I helped India get around the fallen log and get stable over on dry ground to get her bearings.

Donn came over and gave me a hand and we were able to get the kayak up on the log and drain the water out. I guess that's when we saw the hole in the boat. We went on down the river a little bit further. They wanted to give up completely and end the day and I said honestly, I'd like to solve a problem and keep on going.

They finally went ahead and gave in and kept on going but it wasn't too long before we had to take another left off the river and beached on the bank. I tried to do a repair this time.

I looked and saw where water was getting in and I was trying to think of something I can shove up in there. Nothing much came to me but I decided to putting little bitty twigs from a little tree would be a good choice. I was using a method that they had told us about the Navy called shoring. It's where you temporary put blocks of wood into a fractured part of his ship and keep it all in there with some sort of apparatus that you just make the water stop coming in. Well, this was just shoving little toothpicks out of twigs into the hole trying to block the water and believe it or not, it did work. I Macguivered the heck out of it and I was pleased with myself.

One thing that kind of sucked about where we pulled over was you could call it camping if you want but people would come down here and just dump everything they ever owned and burn it and just trashed the whole area. It was their place to go dump trash and sometimes burn and sometimes not. It was very discouraging to see them treat the area so badly. It made the river look really horrible here.

My repair caused the leak to pretty much stop and we safely got to the end of our paddle which was at least five-miles. I got to the dock and pulled the boat out and I called it a good day. It was rough going for awhile but it didn’t totally whoop us so it seemed to be a success to me. I was trying to see the bright side.

A couple of weeks later Donn and I decided the try the Cullasaja but Sandy kind of wanted to paddle up and explore it from a safer angle. I wasn't too excited about that because it means hard work paddling up against the current.

Eventually myself and one of the boys wanted to try paddling from our RV to the riverside park where we had put in before. This spooked Sandy and she wanted to stay back. India felt the same way. The couple that joined Donn and I had brought a dog with them. Their little dog who was like 14 years old came out to the site and hung out for a while.

The wife was feeling like the doggie wasn't capable of going and he had decided to stay back this time. She wasn't sure if India really wanted to babysit the dog as he is really old and so her hub went with me and Donn. We went all down the river and Sandy came to the RV for a while decided she had no desire to do this because it was kind of like unknown territory.She just came by and visited for half an hour or so then went on home.

It was a little challenging because we were scrubbing the bottom pretty regularly. I guess there had been no rain so the water was low. It was fine you just have to work a lot harder than if the water was flowing would do all the work for you. I can't complain about the paddle itself it was a really exciting and a wonderful day. It went on for like 4 hours at least paddling all the way down to the takeout point.

None of us bothered to take cell phones or anything and towards the end of the day Sandy really became concerned that we had gotten into trouble.

She asked the sheriff to keep an eye out for us and eventually the sheriff saw some people like us getting out of the river and said he would get word to Sandy that we were safe and sound and it was all good. As I heard about all this I thought was she was worrying a little too much but hey somebody's got to worry.

Old corundum folk day

There was an announcement at the UU about folk day and how if someone wanted to help make bird houses that would be nice.I kind of volunteered myself to do that and India and I went to The Folk Festival and hung out and I helped out. It was a very fulfilling type day as we were helping young children make bluebird houses.

The guy running it created very organized woodworking stations. Each station represented a small task but we had a really good time. I saw a demonstration of Border Collie’s being worked and watching those guys work was fascinating as all get-out.

They pointed out that border collies like to work and that sometimes people buy them and keep them cooped up in an apartment. Its torture because they really want to get out there and herd something and really work and if you don't let them is messes up their psyche.

India didn't have a whole lot to do and we went to eat and there was a lady making fry bread alone with a long line of customers. She had got ditched by her help so she had like 6 customers in long waits. I mentioned to India if you want to help volunteer to help her make fry bread or something she might appreciate it. She said I really could use some help if you don't mind so that was nice to see India jumping in. She volunteered and it was it was all good stuff and she helped with the lemonade area and making fry bread stuff.

The best part of the day came when a young girl who had never touched a tool in her life seemed to be picking up on how to make a bluebird house pretty well. When she got all the way to the end of the assembly you know now she's kind of pretty good at it. An hour later some really little kids came along and we could always use a little bit more help. She was immediately turned into an educator showing these young kids how to make bluebird houses. An hour prior should never touched a tool at all and now she was teaching people how to use the saw that was a very fulfilling moment.

We really enjoyed our time in Franklin with my Sister and Hubby and nature.