Obed 2002
| For the 2002 Obed River trip, organized by Bob Gaar, we carpooled with Hank and Sally out to Cumberland State Park in central Tenessee to meet up the the rest of the folks. Then we paddled Clear Creek on Friday and some of us paddled Daddy's Creek on Saturday while others (Lynn Gaar, Sally Herrmann and Sarah) drove shuttle. Of course we had a lot of fun and enjoyed getting to catch up with folks. The Saturday shuttle, however, was overly interesting. |
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Clear Creek (Friday's run) was as beautiful as you could ask for. | Daddy's Creek is a lot of fun with some nice drops and a some tight spots. If the roads are open, it's a nice trip about 9 miles long or so. If the roads are closed for turkey hunting (as they were) it becomes a much longer run of 17 miles which makes it tough to do in a day. Unless, you know the secret short cut take-out. At the put in we got out the maps and talked with our faitful shuttle drivers and came up with our plan -- they would take the 4 wheel drives down the short cut take out road and leave a bandana tied to a tree there to signal that we could take out there. Otherwise we would continue down to the take-out we knew we could get to. | |
| It was another beautiful day and we were having a great time on the river. And the bandana was a welcome site after lunch as we were starting to get tired after our 7 miles. However, as George said, the bandana doesn't mean much without the cars. Bob and Hank got out, got the bandana and the note attached next to it. It turns out the 4 wheel drive road on the map really wasn't as much a road as a creek bed. |
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| It turns out, while we were enjoying fun rapids like those above, our faithful shuttle crew were running into boulders to big to get over, and stream beds too deep to cross, tracks too narrow and locals friendly and happy to show off their 4 wheel driver monsters. Lynn, Sarah and Sally managed to talk a couple local Tenesseans into taking Lynn down to the river (they didn't think it was a good idea for Sally and Sarah to ride along in back of the truck) where she left us the bandana and the note telling us that the shuttle "road" wasn't and that they'd leave the cars at the further down takeout. What we hoped would be a fairly reasonable shuttle ending up taking 6 hours to run -- not what anyone had in mind. But we did get to the cars, return the cabin, meet up, thank and listen to the horror stories from our faithful shuttle crew. |
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| Then, it was on to phase two of our trip. Hank and Sally's son, Brian, is hiking the Appalacian trail this summer and they wanted to meet up with him. So we headed from Centeral Tenessee to Hot Springs, NC where the AT comes into town. We checked into our upscale digs at the Duckett House B&B before catching up with Brian and his hiking party. | |
| Sally and Brian had a chance to catch up and also to play with Hank and Sally's new digital camera. And the hikers had a chance to relax, take hot showers, and get cleaned up before a very nice dinner in town. |
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| One of the unexpected fun bits was that we had alerted David's folks and Steve, Helen and Aaron that we would be sort of close to their neighborhood and asked if they wanted to meet up for dinner. However, all those plans were contingent on hearing from Brian just before we headed to Tenesse. So while we had left messages that we would be in NC on Sunday, we hadn't heard back from anyone. So we were pleasantly surprised to see them all pull up to the B&B just after Brian and company showed up. | |
| So while the through hikers relaxed a bit and got cleaned up, Aaron led the rest of us on a short hike through a state park just up the road. We had a great time! |
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| We found a very nice creek, with a place to play Pooh sticks and skip stones. (The same creek went right by the B&B.) And we even found some cool "Fiddle Heads," which someone claimed were good eatin', but we didn't pick any to be added to our dinner. It was a very nice trip, a great combination of boating, exciting shuttle driving, and visiting with friends and family. | |
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