Apologies for the delay in posting. Took us awhile to get the Internet working in the cabin. To catch up, this is the Journal from Sunday.
Our final driving day for a while.
We began the day by worshiping with the members of the Highland United Methodist Church. The church wasn’t too far from the Mammoth Cave Park and had a small, mostly female congregation. In fact, besides us, there were only about three other guys present in the 30 or so member congregation. The boys didn’t want to go up for children’s time because there were way too many girls.
Pastor Donna Aros gave an excellent sermon on Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23. It is Jesus’ parable of the seeds and the soil. The message met my husband’s “requirements of a good sermon.” Pastor Donna focused on the parable’s image of God with his bag of seeds sowing his message of grace with great abandon. He is throwing it out there for all of us without care or consideration over where it lands. She went on to say that it is up to us to make sure that our soil is cultivated enough to hear the message of grace so that it will grow and spread. It was a message that was full of grace and Pastor Donna delivered it with great style.
The church family was also fun to observe. Because it was so small, people were extremely casual with one another and there was a lot of joking and laughing. Our presence in their midst seemed to make them a little nervous, but they managed it well. A couple of the women walked in late and were promptly teased by the rest of the ladies. The last person through the door also happened to be the pianist who swore on a stack of bibles that her watch, which was set by a GPS satellite, was right and the church’s clock was fast. Pastor Donna said fine, as long as she wouldn’t mind calling all the other people of the congregation next Sunday to make sure they knew the right time too.
We enjoyed our time among these smiling, warm, small church folk. The group sang “Wonderful Words of Life,” “In the Garden,” and “He Lives” from the United Methodist Hymnal a little off-key but with great gusto. Charles Wesley would have been proud. We heard announcements about a recent and very successful fundraiser as well as about an upcoming Vacation Bible School and canoe trip. Many people shook our hands and we received several warm smiles. It was a great start to the day.
After that it was back to Mammoth Cave hotel to pack up, check out and get back on the road. We were making some good time until we got on the Cumberland Parkway just outside of Glasgow, Kentucky.
I had settled into reading Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich when suddenly I heard my husband gasp, slam on the breaks and felt him pull over to the side of the road. I looked up and saw what had caused his reaction. A car was in the grassy median of the road, clothing and mud strewn across the far west-bound lanes. It was completely upside down. We were the third car on the scene and I immediately grabbed the cell phone and the map, got out of the car and dialed 911. My husband told the boys to stay put and headed into the median to see what he could do to help. While we were stopped, two additional cars pulled over – one containing an off-duty nurse who immediately took over and organized everyone.
Apparently, a 60ish-year-old woman was driving east-bound heading to pick up her granddaughter at a nearby lake. Her tire blew out forcing her off the road. She hit the soft shoulder and her car did a bumper over grill somersault and landed on its top. She was thankfully wearing her seatbelt and – miracle of miracles – crawled out of the passenger side without her glasses but with only a small scratch on her ankle. She was disoriented and hurt and between the nurse and several other people she was given blankets and pillows to keep her warm and still.
We stayed until the ambulance from Glasgow showed up and then got in the car and continued down the road. I was unable to get back into my book for quite some time. The boys were also pretty shaken. The wreck occupied our conversation for the next several miles.
We ate lunch at Wendy’s in Somerset, Kentucky, headed on east to London to hook up with southbound I-75 which took us into Tennessee. About 20 miles outside of Knoxville, we ran into two lanes of slow moving traffic that looked to be backed up for at least 5-6 miles. When we finally got up to see what was causing the bottleneck, we noticed a semi truck pulled off the road, two police cars directing traffic and another small car in the median with a rear-end that was completely smashed in. There were no longer people at the scene of this wreck. It looked as if the two policemen were simply waiting on a clean-up crew to remove the vehicles and debris from off of the road.
I started to feel as if there were some cosmic forces at work and said a brief thank you prayer to God. Our delay with the first wreck could very well have saved us from being in the immediate area when this one happened. Maybe, maybe not, but my stomach felt a little uneasy for the remainder of the drive.
We headed east from Knoxville on I-40 and entered North Carolina for a beautiful drive skirting the Great Smokey Mountain National Park on the north side. It rained on us the entire way. The mountains truly lived up to their name and we saw a gorgeous rainbow outside of the Dillsboro Huddle Hut where we ate dinner. We drove on up to our cabin which is south and west of Bryson City, just up the mountain from Highway 28 north and could not believe our good fortune.
The cabin and its surroundings are beautiful. We have rented Bearfoot – one of the “value cabins” owned by Watershed Cabins here in North Carolina and we could not be more pleased. It is newly remodeled, contains everything a person could possibly want in a cabin INCLUDING a washer/dryer, two TV’s, a foosball table, an outdoor dining area, a grill, and a hot tub.
The boys were coming out of their skin they were so excited and we all took a dip in the hot tub before bed. I read the boys a chapter out of Harry Potter until all was quiet in the cabin and then set the alarm to get an early start for our day of adventure in Asheville tomorrow. All in all, it was a terrific way to end a long, mentally exhausting day.
