Attracting Natural Disasters Part 2

Yesterday, I told you about my family's tendency to draw natural disasters with our camping trips. All this was really just background leading up to last weekend.

Every year we go camping at Twin Oaks Park near Waycross, Georgia, where they have an awesome bluegrass festival. As I mentioned last Friday, this is precisely where horrible wildfires have been burning for several weeks. I can't believe that, even after being back for days, this fire is still burning, but the drought in Georgia this year has really added to the problem. Roads had been closed near Twin Oaks Park and a number of homes had been destroyed by the fires, but of course we headed for South Georgia anyway.

I don't think we realized the extent of the fire until this trip, so I'm glad we went. Sometimes the horrible events I hear about on the radio news tend to blur into "talk" while I'm getting ready for work or driving. I need a jolt of reality every now and then.

The festival was about 180 miles from my home, but we started breathing smoke after about 30 miles. I don't know how folks have been managing to go about their business all these weeks with the air so thick with smoke. We went through the little town of Pearson and could see the clouds of smoke billowing up. Everyone in the local Hardee's was talking about the fire. Mostly they were talking about the firefighters who are risking their lives for them.

My mother and sister were going to join us the next day, and I was particularly worried about them since they have asthma. The park was hazy and smoky on Thursday, but on Friday we were truly blessed. The wind shifted, and the air cleared. Once again, God blessed us with a great family time together and protected us--in spite of ourselves!

For most of the year, Twin Oaks Park is mainly a quiet farm. I like to speculate about the cows, who go about their business in peace for most of the year. Then suddenly, hundreds of people and campers and noisy people who make strange sounds on twangy instruments descend on them. I think the calves are especially bewildered.

We have one more family camping trip planned for this summer, back to Hunting Island again. I don't know what will be going on as far as hurricanes, but I've already gotten an email from the park about our reservation. They wanted to let us know that we should plan for lots of traffic delays when we come, because a barge ran into a bridge going out to the island and repairs won't be completed until a couple of weeks after our trip.

Oh well. We're packing up anyway.

Attracting Natural Disasters

On the American Christian Fiction Writers email loop this week, people are discussing creative ways to make extra cash to help pay for the annual conference. I just thought of one. I can tell folks that unless they send me large sums of money, I will bring my family to camp near them.

My family's camping trips have always attracted natural disasters. We've long been accustomed to heading out in tornado warnings or flash floods. Usually things clear up by the time we get where we're going--at least enough for us to cope.

I was already a grown woman when my dad got a motor home. Family vacations for us had usually consisted of visiting relatives in other states, but now we intended to go play! We planned a camping trip to the beach in Florida, even though it was a little early in the year and the wind was howling. We didn't care. All of us----my parents, my sister and her family (including my niece and nephew) and me--loaded into that RV and headed out.



We basically lay on the beach in a sandstorm. My father still teases my sister about the sand that stuck in her lip balm in the perfect shape of her lips. But we had a blast. The first time my fiancee (now my husband, Dave) met my family was on one of those camping trips. We had a long distance relationship, and he drove over from Louisiana to meet us on yet another beach in Florida.

For years now, we camp every summer at one of my favorite places in the world, Hunting Island State Park in South Carolina. The woods and the shady trees with moss stretch all the way down to the beach. So I can park a beach chair in the shade from the trees, lie there and watch the waves, and not worry so much about burning this glaring white skin. In fact, I once had a squirrel come down out of an oak tree right onto the beach to beg for potato chips, which he took out of my hand.

Hunting Island is so popular that it's very hard to get a reservation, but about three years ago, I snagged one. I planned that trip four months in advance--and managed to choose a week when not one but THREE hurricanes went up the coast. We were evacuated, which is a good thing, or we probably would have just sat there and waited for it to blow over.

We tried again the next year. I know you won't believe this, but as I left the library to start my vacation, one of my colleagues said, "At least there are no hurricanes predicted this year." That was the week Katrina hit. We traveled other places for a few days first, but by the time we reached Hunting Island, boy was there a hurricane predicted! Katrina didn't make landfall in our area, but we got the residual effects, mostly in wind. I had mentioned to Dave and my dad that I wanted one of those screen tents to put around our picnic table. We sat in the motor home and watched other people's screen tents go blowing past, rolling over and over like a ball. Daddy told me to just go out and grab the one I wanted as it went by.

All of this is leading up to this past weekend. I'll tell you about that tomorrow, in part 2 of this fascinating story.