Unicoi State Park…..here we come.

Having enjoyed Fort Mountain so much, we were looking forward to
our next adventure at Unicoi State Park near Helen, Georgia. We had heard many
good things about Unicoi and had pretty high expectations of the place.
Unfortunately, as is often the case with high expectations, Unicoi did not exactly live
up to them, but was fun none the less.
When we arrived, the campground was pretty packed so we wound up
getting stuck at a campsite at the entrance to one of the campground loops,
which meant we experienced a lot more traffic there than if we had been farther
in. More traffic means more panic attacks when cars come and you don’t have
your eyes directly on the little ones. If I heard “where are the
kids?” once, I heard it a thousand times during that trip. The campsites
in our loop were not very private and we had a clear view of 8-10 other campers
from our spot. And what interesting campers they were! Across from us was a
middle-aged couple that traveled all over the place on a Honda Goldwing
motorcycle with a little trailer hitched to it that contained all their camping
equipment. They exuded the serenity of people who have not a care in the world.
Next to them was a sweet young couple taking their first trip away from their
first baby who was about a year old. They wound up cutting their vacation a
little short due to the antics of the people camping directly across from them
(and two sites down from us). Those folks, another middle aged couple, camped
in a van (no tent, no camper, just the van) and spent their day sitting in lawn
chairs doing absolutely nothing. They weren’t loud or obnoxious, in fact, I
never saw them engage with anyone other than each other and they barely did
that. So, why would they disturb the sweet young couple across from them? Well,
it seems that in the world of the van-people, clothing was optional.
Apparently, when they awoke in the morning they strutted around in the buff
completely unconcerned that others might be watching. Thankfully, we never saw
it as the young couple described it as being enough to cause retinal scarring -
apparently some folks should really keep their clothes on!
Our second day there we headed out to hike at near by Ruby Falls, it was a beautiful hike. The water fall at the top was gorgeous. Maggie made a friend along the way….Saw this really neat tree that grew directly out of a boulder….As with each of our camping adventures, we learned something on
this trip. It turns out that if you take our youngest child on a camping trip,
she will get sick. She doesn’t get sick before we go, or even after we get
there. She literally starts showing symptoms either as we are packing the stuff
in the car or as we are driving to our destination. It’s like magic. In my last
blog, I didn’t mention that after arriving at Enota, Reagan spiked a fever and
spent much of our trip clinging to one of us because she didn’t feel well. At
Fort Mountain, same thing to a lesser extent. She remained true to form at
Unicoi only this time she got really sick. Her little cough went from
occasional to constant and her respirations increased to the point where we
realized we had to do something. So, on the morning of day two after an almost
sleepless night, I packed her up and headed back to Atlanta to one of the
Children’s Healthcare Clinics to have her seen. We spent a couple of hours
there as they gave her breathing treatments to open up her bronchial passages.
Poor baby girl! Although still a happy one… We then dropped by the pharmacy to fill her prescriptions and
headed back to the campground.
On Saturday some friends of ours and their little boy joined us at
our campsite. These folks actually know how to camp and are not nearly the
princesses that Dawn and I can be. They sleep in a two-person tent and can fit
all their camping supplies in a zip-lock bag. Meanwhile Dawn and I fill up our
SUV and the pop-up with all our crap for a three-day trip. They put us to
shame. But what we didn’t realize about these guys is that, more often than
not, they bring horrific weather with them wherever they camp. True to form,
that night the skies opened and a torrential downpour hit the campground. Being
new to the camper world, we did not realize what happens when you put hundreds
of gallons of water on top of an aluminum-framed awning – it will collapse.
Unfortunately, our hard-core camping friends had put their tent up under the
awning to help stay dry but that did not work out so well. About 5am when it finally collapsed it did so on their heads, literally. One of the
girls had a gash in her head from the awning frame and all three of them were
soaked to the bone. What a mess. We discovered that packing up a wet pop-up
camper is not, I repeat, not fun. So, another camping adventure comes to an end….a very wet end. Next time maybe we’ll pay more attention to the forecast.