It's been a year since I went back to work full-time.
Eventually I will have all of our vacation posts done.
I'm trying to be more intentional in writing posts.
Before I get to the main point of our misadventures with the weather, I'll show this interesting picture:
This was posted in the camp store at Blackberry Blossom.
Hm.
It was both cool and scary at the same time.
I'm happy to report that we never saw or heard Norman.
Maybe it had something to do with the weather!
That was in the beginning of our trip.
It was fun.
There's always a risk factor when camping: weather.
It's so unpredictable.
The meteorologists do their best at forecasting.
In the end, it's still somewhat of a gamble.
We try to plan accordingly but it's still risky.
That's part of camping.
We've been camping since 2013 and it's always an adventure.
For the most part we're fair weather campers.
I mean, who desires to camp in the inclement weather?
Over the years we've had the occasional passing shower or evening steady rain.
We've even endured the mid 40's as a low. It was a little chilly!
This time, however, was different.
Storms...hail...wind...rain...off and on the entire time we camped in Unicoi.
Yuk!
Knowing bad weather was most likely to happen we got to Unicoi and set up our tent before it hit.
Our thinking was to put the tent up while it was dry.
That worked out fairly well.
It stayed beautiful long enough to set up camp.
This is our second time camping here.
As long as we are able, I think we'll camp at Blackberry Blossom.
It's a special place.
We used the WiFi at he camp store to keep and eye on the radar.
We were really hoping the ugliest of the storms would miss us.
N o p e.
Noticing the approaching storm we had to decide on what to do.
Stay at the camp or head to family the next town over.
We opted for visiting family even though we could have rode out the storm in the camp store.
We secured all of our gear and high tailed it off the mountain.
There's nothing like racing down a mountain trying to beat a storm!
Let's just say the storm hit as we got to the bottom.
We had to pull over because there was lots of hail and wind.
Another storm was in Erwin.
After visiting family we headed back to camp.
And of course it started raining pouring again.
It's hard to see but the tent is behind the pole under the tree.
What is also hard to pick up in a photo is that there was a STREAM of water flowing toward the tent.
It was at this point Dwayne got out and started digging a trench with a rock so the water would flow around the tent. It was also when the boys and I decided to stay in the van and ask each other who was going out to help. We decided it was a one person job.
It was also decided that we needed a shovel... so off to Walmart we went for the said tool.
This is a small creek that is across the field from our tent.
It was running quite full after the storm!
Our intact tent.
No damage and no leaks!
Nothing but a soggy camp sight.
We later learned that the storm wasn't bad on the mountain.
I'm guessing we drove through the worst part!
Oh well.
The storms were intermittent.
We took advantage of the times between storms.
We made several trips to Walmart for supplies...and a dry place to hang out.
On one of those trips we decided to get a canopy. We had been thinking about it for a while.
We debated on the size and ended up with a larger one.
It was so big that we put two of legs in the creek so it would fit in our campsite.
Oops. It still worked great and kept us dry.
We still had a fire or two.
We tried some of the colored flame stuff.
It was pretty cool to watch.
I forgot about the rainbow until I was going through the photos for this post.
There is a faint second one if you look closely.
We survived our soggy camping experience.
It was definitely memorable.
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