March 25th to March 26th:
As soon as we arrived home from Door County, Julia took off for an
Easter Egg Hunt that she has organized for many years. I jumped in the
Nissan truck and started driving south on my tenting/hiking trip. I
stayed overnight at a cheap Red Roof motel in Louisville, Kentucky and
then continued on the next morning for another six hours before arriving
at Roan Mountain State Park during the early afternoon. I wasn’t really sure what the campground would be like, so I was pleasantly surprised to find my tent site about six big steps from a beautiful creek on the side of the mountain. That’s my truck and tent across the creek.
Add a picnic table, fire ring, on-site water spigot, tent pad, heated bathrooms, and hot showers–for $15/night, and sign me up again. While the rv section of the campground was about half-full, I was the only one tent camping this early in the season. A somewhat negative surprise was that no alcoholic beverages were allowed in the campground. For someone used to camping in Wisconsin, that seemed almost anti-patriotic. Fortunately, I didn’t learn about that prohibition until the day before I left, so I figured that I was “grandfathered,” more or less. I imbibed in moderation. No harm, no foul.
On the afternoon of my arrival, I set up camp and hiked a couple of trails inside the campground that were on the other side of the creek and went up the mountain. After stretching my legs for four or five miles, I ate a light dinner and turned in early. By the time darkness arrived around 8 pm, the temperature dropped off quite a bit. During the night, I pulled on a fleece sweater and put on my knit hat. I won’t lie; I still got cold. My twenty degree sleeping bag was not up to the task on the first night. I tossed and turned a bit, knowing that I was returning to the Appalachian Trail in the morning and would be going up into the balds.
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