A Perfect Week

Our friends loan us Wilma, the pickup truck for our annual trip to Fall Creek Falls.

Every year our family packs the cars to the gills and heads to Southeastern Tennessee to camp at Fall Creek Falls State Park. This park holds a special place in my heart as I have been going there since my 4th grade Tennessee Naturally field trips (thanks Mr. Rust and Mr. Baum!). We connected with the Duke family at our church with a “You like to camp? I like to camp too!” conversation and off we went. Looking back on family life, it’s surprising which traditions stick and which ones don’t. This one stuck and I’m so glad it did. We’ve gone at least once a year for the past twelve years. Now we book an entire campground for a week and fill the campsites with multiple rotating families and friends.

Now if you’ve never camped, this is what you need to know: planning and packing for a family camping trip is a real pain in the booty. My sweet wife pours over menu plans for our family and coordinates our nightly potlucks with Mama Duke. Then there’s the packing of clothes. Invariably, at least one of the kids has outgrown something that they need for camping. If we’re on top of our game, we discover it before the stressed-out-cussing-“why do we do this?” stage of camping preparation. We’re not always at the top of our game. This year we also had a surprising ant infestation in our popup camper. Getting rid of this became my chore.  That and assuring my wife the trip would be great fun! I say this to say that the work of a camping trip is extremely front-loaded. The better you prepare, the better time you’ll have. And if you’re going to do it, I recommend doing it at least for two nights. Shorter than that is hardly worth the trouble.

But we stayed for a week. And this week was especially fabulous. The weather was fantastic (FCF is on the Cumberland Plateau which is almost always 10 degrees cooler than Nashville), the trail conditions were great, and the company even better.

The week afforded me some much-needed rest after all of the activity around my oldest daughter’s wedding just three weeks prior.  I used the time to read Brene Brown’s outstanding Braving the Wilderness. Its main theme is “true belonging” and reading and reflecting at that moment gave me a deep sense of gratitude for the loving and supportive community that surrounded us at Emily’s wedding, these other families that have poured so much into the lives of our children, and the friends that like to hang out with me in the woods.

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