Not According to Plan

Everything started out fine yesterday. Our plan was to get everything packed, get the temporary fix done on the forward jacks and get on the road by 1 PM. The fix was performed after we got all packed up, hitched to the truck and all the slideouts pulled in. Josie took this shot of the work being performed on the jacks:

The fix involved attaching a couple marine tie-down brackets to the underside of the rig and using bungee cords to prevent the jacks from drifting down while traveling. The final result looks like this:

It was a little after 1 PM when we finally left the campground and Josie caught this scene of the campground as we were leaving:

As you can see, there were only a handfull of people left in the park when we left - would the last person to leave please turn out the lights.

Everything went according to plan until we arrived at our destination in Sparta, TN, at the Burgess Falls State Park. We arrived at 4:30 PM and had a hard time maneuvering into the tight entrance to the park. There were no visible camping spots and a Ranger immediately drove up to help us. It turns out that this particular State Park is for day-use only and there are no camping spots anywhere. I never saw any mention of that on the website. Of course, there is no mention of the campsites either. Anyway, the nice Ranger gave us a map and told us that there was another State Park, 45 minutes down the road that does have camping. The Fall Creek Falls State Park was on the way to Chattanooga, so why not try it.

By the time we arrived there it was around 6 PM and it was pitch black outside. I'm not a fan of trying to locate a site in the dark anyplace we ever go. That's why we always plan to arrive early enough to avoid the darkness. Well, we drove around the loop "B" of campsites (Reference the site map on the above link) and it was so dark and thickly wooded that we could hardly even see where the sites were, let alone back into one in this thick forest. To make a long story short, we aborted the attempt to find a space in this park and decided to ask somebody if there was another "local" campground nearby. We stopped at a convenience store right outside the State Park and the person at the counter told us about a campground just down the street called Sunrise Campground. We found the sign, drove in - on a very narrow dirt road - and stopped about 200 yards in on this road. Josie drove the Jeep further into this remote road and discovered that it was a church campground, and closed for the season. Now the frustration level hit it's peak. I had to back our rig out of this place, in the pitch black, with ditches on both sides of the dirt road. It was a nail-biter all the way back out to the main road. On the way out, the truck grazed a small embankment and ripped one of my mud flaps loose from the truck frame. This was the crowning blow. The way we went back to the freeway from this remote location was a winding, twisting, hair-pin curved road that we could only travel at about 20 MPH.

It was then that we decided to go the rest of the way to Chattanooga and try to get into the campground there, where we were to stay while the warranty work was to be done on our jacks. So, here we are in the campground at Camping World in Chattanooga, TN - a day early. We arrived at 10:30 PM and found a spot and went out to have some dinner before turning in for the night.

Stay tuned for our first day adventure in Chattanooga, TN...