A place to visit again

On the morning we left Lake Norman, we kept our scheduled appointment at Camping World of Statesville, NC. 

You may recall that we had been having problems with the front landing gear on our 5^th wheel Trailer. Those 2 legs on the front of the trailer are what lifts the trailer up and off the of hitch and then levels the trailer for living. It uses a powerful 12-volt motor and a gearbox to do its job. Mine has a problem which was diagnosed by a capable technician, but they didn’t have a part. We took the part number and hope to get the part and fix the problem now that we are stationary here in Georgia. 

We got on our way south from Camping World late morning and arrived at the Core of Engineers campground about 4:00. 

Hawe Creek Campground is on 70,000-acre J. Strom Thurmond Lake which boasts 1,000+ miles of shoreline. There is excellent boating, water skiing, swimming, fishing, hiking and picnicking opportunities and a campground with 34 electric sites, most of which are on the waterfront. Flush and vault toilets, drinking water, showers, drinking water, a dump station and boat ramp are available. 

Wildlife, including southern bald eagles, migratory waterfowl, wild turkeys and whitetail deer, is abundant around the lake which is said to provide some of the best fishing, hunting, and water sports in the southeastern United States. Anglers fish for largemouth bass, bream, crappie, catfish and striped bass. The large lake offers endless boating, water skiing, jet skiing, canoeing and swimming opportunities.

Imagine laying on your back looking up the tree.

The convenient, pull-through campsites are flat, level, spacious and done in fine, granite gravel. It was great to have electricity for air conditioning after a few nights without up at Lake Norman. This is a place we will definitely revisit for a longer stay! 

Sadly, this campground closed the weekend after we departed. It doesn’t make sense to me that you would close such a great campground in the south of South Carolina at the end of September when it could stay open for another month or two if not all year. Oh well, I should know by now that government decisions don’t always make sense.

Our next stop after Hawe Creek was to be in central Georgia, but that’s not what happened. Come back to find out what Mosey’nMillers did instead.

What happened to October?

Wow! October has flown by almost without me noticing. OK, so the 17^th was my birthday and we went out for supper, but with the weather down here in Georgia remaining pretty much constant instead of summer fading into fall, time slipped by. Darlene & I were getting acclimated to living in our 5^th wheel trailer full time, learning what was expected of us as Park Hosts, and adjusting to having no television and limited Internet access. The ever-shortening days went by and the blogging languished. Now it’s November, we have fixed our Internet access problem, and we’re pretty much in the groove here at General Coffee State Park. So, let me finish the saga of traveling from Indy to Douglass, GA.

In my last blog we were in Virginia heading south. From Pioneer Village in VA we had a fairly short, leisurely drive to Lake Norman State Park near Troutman, North Carolina.

Since I had been having some trouble with my front landing gear on the trailer when raising the trailer to hitch to the truck, we stopped at Camping World (which just happened to be at our exit) to check it out. I got an appointment for the day we were to leave, so it would be a convenient stop. 

Lake Norman is the largest manmade lake in North Carolina. The State Park boasts a great mountain biking network, a swimming beach and bathhouse complex, a boat ramp, and much more. Of course, it has a campground.

Arriving at a campground where you have never been, to find your site & park is sometimes an adventure in itself. So it was that day. Pulling up to the site, I was immediately and undoubtedly convinced that NO ONE could get my rig into that site. Bummer!! The site was long enough. But the road was narrow and carefully guarded by posts and trees which would make backing a 40 foot trailer into the site impossible. That’s an aggravating deficiency of Reserveamerica.com. The computer knows the length of the rig and the site and they match so you get the site. Wrong! I can’t just drop my trailer on the site from above. I have to be able to maneuver it into the site from the road. Without going into a lot of physics and using numerous drawings, you may not understand, but believe me, that site and my trailer were not a matching pair. Stupid software!

We talked to a very nice Campground Host who wanted to help but could not authorize a site-swap. The campground was full but not all sites were occupied yet. There was hope. A call to the park ranger in an office somewhere got me the name and number of a person in a site I could use (don’t tell HIPAA!). They agreed to a swap when I called. Irritated, but thankful for an understanding camper, we got into a suitable site.

One caveat: Lake Norman has no hookups (I knew that when I made the reservation). That’s not a problem for us with the water we carry and the solar panels and inverter to provide electricity. We had a great couple days in a beautiful state park.

Oh, about that appointment at Camping World for my landing gear problem, come on back read more adventures of Mosey’nMillers.

Pioneer Village Campground in VA

As I write today we are comfortably camped at General Coffee State Park near Douglas, GA. That’s many miles and 10 days since I last posted about our travels. I’m sorry. I owe you an explanation. So here goes.

I intentionally planned our route from home to General Coffee SP to avoid large metropolitan areas and to frequent Interstate highways only as necessary. As a result, we were mostly out of cell range (and thus Internet access) for much of the 10 days traveling. You might find it hard to believe, but there are lost of places where Verizon has sporadic to no signal. No Internet, no posts :-(

Now, let me catch you up on our travels. While we saw a lot of new and different countryside and many beautiful vistas, our trip was mostly about getting from home to here. So, after escaping Mothman, we typically drove a day and sat a day and drove again. That said, I don’t have stories and pictures about battlefields or caves or cars buried nose first in the ground. We did experience several great campgrounds that we would revisit if given the chance. Let me tell you about them.

  

Pioneer Village RV Park near Max Meadows, VA is a great campground with all pull-thru sites with full hookups as far as I could tell. There were some long-term folks there living in RV’s while working on a pipeline. There were some seasonal campers and plenty of us RV’ers passing through. 

A beautiful small river with noisy rapids and quiet pools runs along one side of the campground in a pastoral park—a fantastic place to walk the dog and soak up nature. 

All this and it’s only a hundred yards from the Interstate which overlays traffic noise on all the convenience and beauty. What’s the saying? “You can’t have it all.”

A funny, sad, side-note to our stay in VA. On our morning to sit & relax there was an elderly (more elderly that me) couple in a nice Class-C Motorhome next to us. They were breaking camp to leave as I sat under my awning sipping coffee. They got everything picked up and the RV started to pull forward. It stopped. It backed up a little. The older couple got out & started examining the side of the RV away from my view. A few minutes passed. I saw the older (than me) gentleman walking around, So I asked if something was wrong? Need help?  He gestured for me to come around to his campsite, so I walked over. 

The awning which is supposed to stick straight out 8 feet or so was strangely swept back toward the rear at about a 45 degree angle. Ooops!! He had gotten everything ready to leave, except the awning. It was never retracted. When it met the tree in his campsite, the tree won. He had no clue what to do. We tried to pull/push it back into place so they could drive home. No joy! 

I finally explained that probably the only thing to do was remove it from the RV. That is what we did. After cutting the fabric loose from the top, I unscrewed the rails from the side of the RV, cut the electric connections and he was free to go. The nice park caretakers agreed to dispose of the evidence. I would like to have heard the account he gave his insurance agent.

The next morning Darlene & I set out through Virginia for our next stopover in North Carolina. Come on back to hear more about the Mosey’n the Millers were doing.

The serenity of sunrise in the forest

I'm sitting on the white-granite-sand patio of our campsite sipping my morning coffee. The sun is making its way over the horizon, but I won't see it for a while because the tall pine & hardwood forest surrounds me. Only directly overhead can I see the sky blue-ing in the circle of the tree tops. My coffee is a welcome and familiar smell, but there are other pleasing odors of pine and forest that I don't often get to enjoy. A variety of birds are chirping, squawking and singing their morning songs, many of which I don't recognize, but mixed with the familiar “caw” of the crows. Water lapping the shore below, the splash of an osprey snatching breakfast from the lake and an antiphonal chorus of woodpeckers hammering in the trees adds to the morning symphony. 

There are no “people” sounds yet; most are still asleep. My phone won't disrupt the natural sounds because we are beyond cell range. Beyond the range of much of civilization, we are deep in God's remarkable creation. But God is near with His astounding blessings. Yet as thankful as I am at being immersed in these blessings of nature, I am even more thankful to be immersed in God's forgiveness, mercy and love through my savior, Jesus. The wonders of this life and this earth will all pass away and pale by comparison with the New Creation we will all enjoy one day through faith in Jesus. 

Well, there it goes, my perfect morning has been disrupted. The sounds of a diesel pickup, the smell of a badly tuned gas engine, tent poles clicking as they are dismantled, and overly loud conversations are invading the bliss of my morning. But that's the way it is with life. Sin invades and disrupts the perfect creation God intended. Nevertheless, the sun creeps over the forest horizon and a new day gets under way. I face this day and every new day with confidence that the Son of God, my brother and friend, Jesus, is also rising in my life and will one day make all things new. As beautiful as this setting is in the South Carolina forest, the New Heavens and Earth will be unfathomably more beautiful. So, I will wait expectantly and go get another cup of morning brew.

We escaped Mothman!

Welcome back to Mosey’nMillers. It was a close call, but we safely escaped the Mothman. Mothman?

In West Virginia folklore, Mothman is a creature reportedly seen in the Point Pleasant area from November 1966, to December 1967. The newspaper report published in the Point Pleasant Register was titled "Couples See Man-Sized Bird ... Creature ... Something". 

The national press picked up the reports and spread the story across the United States. Mothman was popularized in a book The Mothman Prophecies, claiming that there were supernatural events related to the sightings, and a connection to the collapse of the Silver Bridge. The 2002 film The Mothman Prophecies was based on that book. An annual festival in Point Pleasant is devoted to the Mothman legend. 

We missed the big shindig by a few days.







The Silver Bridge was a suspension bridge built in 1928 and named for the color of its aluminum paint. It carried U.S. Route 35 over the Ohio River, connecting Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Gallipolis, Ohio. On December 15, 1967, the Silver Bridge collapsed while it was full of rush-hour traffic, resulting in the deaths of 46 people.

Point Pleasant is located at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawaha Rivers, so it inevitably has flooding issues. 

The 1937 the flood came to the second floor windows.

After several once-in-500-year- floods within several decades, a high flood wall was built around the central city. A wonderful river-front park, walkway and State Park are a great place to spend the afternoon absorbing local history. The Flood wall is decorated with murals illustrating the town’s past.

The following statues and murals are found in the river-front park.

In front of the Silver Bridge mural.

What happened? What now?

Good morning Mosey’nMillers fans, from Klodel Park Campground in beautiful Point Pleasant, West Virginia. To see more about this park go to Krodel Campground.

Wait a minute! How and why did we get here and why now? Ok, let me back up and start where you last heard from me.

Late in March 2017 we were serving as “Hosts” at Pedernales Falls State Park in sunny Texas. I mentioned that on April 1st we would set out for home. We were excited about traveling the beautiful, 444 mile Natchez Trace Parkway. Well, it didn’t happen like that.

Just before we were scheduled to leave, Darlene was diagnosed with a minor illness, but one which effected our travel plans. We decided to “make a bee line” for Indy because travel was uncomfortable for her. We took the shortest route and did our overnights in Walmart parking lots. Once home, she was back on her feet quickly and normal life in Indiana resumed. At least for a couple months.

We began planning our “Great Northwestern Loop” which would take us across the northern United States and some Canadian provinces, through the Rockies to visit Banff National Park, down into ID, WA, OR & CA. We would winter in the southwest before returning to Indy in the spring of 2018. That was the plan, but God had something else in mind. 

In June I had an inquiry from the President of the Ohio District LC-MS about my work as an Intentional Interim Pastor. His inquiry eventually … after many questions, conversations, and prayer … led to my accepting a call to be Interim Pastor of St. John Lutheran Church in Garfield Heights, OH. And yes, that’s a long way from home, over 5 hours driving.

From September 1, 2017 until August 19, 2018 I Pastored St. John and led them in a process of self-evaluation and discovery as to their future in mission and ministry following the retirement of a long-term pastor (29 years). The church provided me with an apartment and car, so I lived comfortably and came home to be with Darlene & family often. Our plans to do the “Great Northwestern Loop” had been postponed for a year. But we were excited about starting that long trip within a few weeks after I finished in Cleveland. But it’s obvious that didn’t happen!

While we are indeed in God’s merciful and gracious hands all the time, in this broken world unexpected and unpleasant things happen; in July our water well went dry (we live in the country and don’t have city water). In such an instance, the only fix is to drill a new well. And a new well costs a lot of $$,$$$. This large financial setback meant that our Northwestern trip would again be postponed. But why are we in West Virginia?

There are less expensive ways to travel and escape the mid-west winter than going to the southwest via Canada. Going to Georgia and staying on one place for the winter saves lots of $,$$$ and meets all our Mosey’n criteria. So on August 18, we set out for our winter destination in sunny, warm General Coffee State Park in southeast Georgia. What’s general coffee? I drink Starbucks. And why there?  You’ll just have to come back for my next post as we move on from Point Pleasant WV to our destination in the south. God be with you till then.