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When I was growing up in South Florida my family were avid campers. We belonged to a camping club and once a month we would travel to different campgrounds to enjoy the outdoors and the fellowship of the members of the camping club. The organization our camping club belonged to was the National Campers and Hikers Association (NCHA) which is now referred to as Family Campers and RVers (FCRV). Every year the NCHA would hold a camping convention which was a weeklong event held in a different part of the United States each year.
One summer when I was a teenager, our family went to a “campvention” in Illinois. Upon traveling with our camping friends on our way home, their motorhome broke down as we were passing through Tennessee. Luckily we were not far from Old Stone Fort State Park located in Manchester, Tennessee. It was a wonderful state park that had some campsites available. Once we got settled in our campsite, we decided to go exploring through the park. We all had bicycles and were riding through the park enjoying the beautiful mountain scenery. As we were riding along, we realized somewhere along the way that one of our friends was missing. We all panicked and turned around to find that she had tipped her bike over and fell and we didn’t even know it! Apparently it was quite a graceful fall and she didn’t make a sound while doing it. She was fortunate in that she did not get hurt. She picked herself up and we went on our way. We came upon a beautiful river which you could access by going down the riverbank. We all went down the bank just to get a closer look at the river. It was such an awesome sight and the river appeared to have a slate rock bottom. The water was quite shallow and we all decided to just take a few steps out into the river to wet our feet. The first one stepped in and boy was that rock slippery! Down she went on her keister! Of course, this created a challenge for the rest of us and we knew we would be able to walk in the water without falling. The next one stepped in very carefully since she knew it was going to be slippery. She walked about 3 or 4 steps and down she went as well. It was almost like a water slide. Once she went down, she started sliding down the river. Luckily she was able to stop herself but we were all laughing hysterically. Before we left the river, all four of us had accidently slid down the river. It was such fun!
That evening we all sat around talking and enjoying some s’mores and then it came time to go to bed. Since our friend’s motorhome was being fixed, they had to bunk with us. Our parents got the camper and all we had was a pup tent or a van to sleep in. We decided to try the pup tent. It was quite small and there were 4 of us, a cat and a litter box. We were a little cramped but decided it would be okay until we saw a very large shadow of an animal walking right outside our tent. Being four teenage girls from the city, this did not sit well with us. All we could think was we were going to be eaten by a bear! After we were sure the animal had passed by, we decided to move our sleeping quarters to the van. We peeked out of the tent and discovered the huge shadow we saw was actually a large dog; a large, cute, and friendly dog. We still figured the van would be a better place to sleep. It was a little bit bigger and definitely safer or so we thought… We got all of our sleeping bags, the cat, and the litter box situated in the van and was just starting to fall asleep when we started hearing a very strange noise. There was something flying around inside the van. It was something large enough to make quite a banging noise when it hit the roof or the windows of the van. We started screaming and jumping around because even though we had a flashlight, we could not see what it was. We just knew it had to be a bat or something equally scary. With all of the noise we were making, it awakened our parents and one of them came out to see what was happening. In our state of panic inside the van, we didn’t notice that someone had come to check on us. All we saw was someone’s face in the window and that furthered our panic. Once we realized it was not the boogeyman, we let them in so they could help us figure out what was flying around. We finally settled down after a few minutes only to discover it was just a large moth flying around, certainly nothing to be scared of. We chased the moth out and were eventually able to fall asleep. Morning seemed to have come very quickly and boy were we happy to see the daylight! We left the park that day and even though the park was beautiful and the river was great, that was one camping adventure I was happy to have ended. -AB
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