#359 CEDARS OF LEBANON near Nashville

We had stayed at The Cedars of Lebanon State Park about a year prior and it was very pretty. People might ask why we didn't stay closer to Nashville because there are a lot of nightclubs and people just sitting around drinking you listening to country music. Being in recovery that's not the best situation for me. It’s about $80 to see a country music star perform. That's not usually what I do with my time. I guess we could go look at all of the recording studios but that doesn’t do anything for me either. There was only one RV park and since it was Nashville it was about 100 per night.

We had stayed at Cedars just after we bought the new RV. It was in our path so we were happy to visit there again. They allowed a pretty decent senior discount and we liked that too so we stayed for 3 nights. They told us we could pick any site we liked so I drove around and I found one that all liked. I have to tell you the entry was kind of narrow and up a hill so I had to go in on a tight angle up a hill and then it flattened out after a bit. That parking job was pretty tough. It was also a little strange in that once I got settled in and opened up the slide outs there was like an inch of clearance.

Sometimes on the first day, we don't do much more than breathe a big sigh of relief that we got there safely and settled in. We went into town for dinner.

The next day we went on a nice hike and it was very pretty. At some point, the trail markers went away and we just couldn't tell exactly where the trail went. I said, India if we just cross this little field we can catch the trail over there. The problem was the weeds were as high as your chest and eventually, there were some briars and I felt like India was cussing me a little bit for putting her through all that. I was trying to tell her that if we went the long way it was going to be about a mile but if we went across this little field it was probably maybe a hundred yards. By the time we got to the other side, she was cussing me. When we were in the middle of it the tension got a little heavy but by the time we got towards the house, we were both laughing at that crazy situation. She would probably say I survived another unexpected Randall adventure.

My son Ben is building at Skoolie and he wanted to do cedar for the ceiling but when we were looking at the price it was up to $25 per board at Lowe's. Sometimes we could find something affordable but shipping sent the costs through the roof. It was a nice idea but not likely as it would just be cost-prohibitive. The next day I had wondered if there are any cedars in Lebanon so I just typed it into the internet and sure enough there was a cedar mill nearby.

It was called Grants Cedar Mill not 30 minutes away from the park. The prices looked really good. I called the cedar mill and ask if had cedar boards for sale to the public and they said yeah come see us. They had ½”x 4” cedar boards 8 feet long for about $2.00 a board.

I called my son Ben and he was very excited about the whole thing and we ended up getting maybe $400 worth as this was enough to do the entire project with 10% waste calculated in.

I got all the boards loaded on the back of the truck and drove back to the RV.

I thought maybe I could put them in the back of the truck all the way home but I could see they would hit the RV when we went around corners so I ended up putting it all in our storage compartment. It just took every square inch of the room so we had so we ended up living with cedar for a while.

When we got to North Carolina he met us in Winston-Salem to take the wood home. It was a really good outcome to just a quirky idea of do they have Cedar in Cedars of Lebanon. Of course, the answer was yes with bells on.

The next day went on a longer hike and it was supposed to be 2 miles round trip. There was a fork in the trail where we weren't sure exactly what to do but I thought that it would Fork right and take his back to the campground road pretty quickly but it didn’t happen that way.

We kept on walking and walking then finally we were at someone's residence and the highway. We didn’t have a signal on the phone so at the road, we weren't sure whether to go left or right. India thought left so we went to the left for a little bit but then I had this really funny feeling we were going the wrong way so I suggested let's go to the right. The way back was to the right but we had already been about a mile and a half and it ended up being a mile and a half more just to the entrance of the State Park. Now we've been about 3 miles and it looks like it's two more just to get to the campground so we knew we were past our limit. We decided if we could flag somebody down we would ask for a ride back as our legs were about dead. When you're doing this sort of thing you get a lot of looks like this is not my problem. I get that we probably looked like homeless hitchhiker's so after a while, we just sat down on a concrete thing above a creek to rest. Soon enough the nicest lady turned around and came back and said do you guys need some help?

We told her that we had underestimated the distance and we were all kinds of exhausted but we had two more miles to go. She offered to give us a ride to the campground we thank her quite a bit. We talked a little and she said she had come to visit her parents who were also full-time RV people and she dropped us off at the RV and we were just so thankful. India is thinking, here we are again having another unexpected Randall Adventure. India was understanding that we both made the same mistake and nobody knew what was going to happen till it happened but boy we were sleeping well that night. We have a cat finder now but I had misplaced it and Bert was hard to find again on the day we left. I immediately ordered a new one and had it in a day or two. That would be it for Cedars of Lebanon.