you can only be so prepared

If I could rate our adventure today on a scale from 1 to 10, it would be in double digits. Our drive to the Great Smoky Mountains was very uneventful—we drove 525 miles, cruising through Paducah KY, Nashville TN, and finally to the GSM National Park. We made good time, despite losing an hour to Eastern Daylight Time.

The campground at Cade’s Cove was lovely. Our spot was C-7, complete with a fire ring, picnic table and tent pad. It was time to finally unload the car and get set up so I could cook our first camp meal. As we started to pull out all the camping gear, including the tent, cookstove, lantern, etc, we started to feel the exhilaration of camping in God’s beautiful world. It was time to set up the tent first. I unrolled the tent and just stood there staring at it as Chris came over to figure out why I wasn’t putting it up. Then he realized it too…it was not our camping tent, but our screened-in tent for the picnic table! *$#()$%^* (actually, laughing was all we could do, it was pretty funny and we will never forget it!)

What were we to do? Our brand new tent must have gotten put up on the shelf in the garage and we grabbed the wrong tent—their cases look a lot alike. It was now 7 p.m. and we hadn’t eaten AND we didn’t have a place to sleep. Thank goodness for the Garmin GPS that we borrowed from the Theimers. We plugged in “Wal-Mart” (that’s where we got our last, unused tent) to see where the closest one was. Only 28 miles to Maryville TN to the nearest Wal-Mart, but in the mountains it took Chris 45 minutes one way.

Sure enough, they had the same tent we have on our garage shelf for the same price ($49). So Chris picked it up and then stood in the Express Checkout for 15 minutes behind the four women, each with more than 10 items. Finally, two hours later, he arrived back at the campsite. All this while, I set up the screen tent and began cooking the chicken/veggie foil dinner. It was getting dark and ominous. Then the heavens unloaded buckets of water on me. I’m so glad we accidentally packed the screen tent—it was the only thing to protect me and we could eat in a drier setting.

We ate and listened to the monsoon on the other side of the thin screen, praying for it to stop so we could finally set up the sleeping tent. At about 10:30 p.m. the rain let up enough for us to get set up. It’s kind of difficult to put together a 10’x13’ tent in the dark with oversized ponchos on, but with a few re-dos, we erected the structure, blew up the air mattress, made the bed and prepared for sleep. It was a beautiful night—the clouds opened up again with another deluge, but this time we stayed dry.

Morning greeted us with an alarm clock of a large crow perched above our tent, cawing until we emerged from our cocoon. Another day begins…