5th Stop - Little River Canyon National Preserve (AL)
Blog Post #12 - Written May 25, 2025
Stay: May 11-13, 2025
5th Stop - Little River Canyon National Preserve (AL)
Our adventure down to Sweet Home Alabama begins on Mother's Day in Tennessee. Megan found a church on our way, 1.5 hours into the drive, that began at 10am. So we hustled to be ready to leave by 8am. We figured that since our children wake us up at/before 6am everyday anyway (they wake up with the sun, and the sun wakes up really early on the eastern edge of the Central Time Zone!), we should be able to do it in 2 hours. Ha. Haha. Hahaha! Such optimistic naiveté.
Breaking camp for normal RVers (sans offspring) is an ordeal. With 3 kids, it's a feat of human endurance, patience, careful coordination, and ingenuity. I probably started us off on a slow foot by making a big, elaborate, delicious breakfast, since it was Mother's Day. That took an hour. Then several things delayed us, like having to 'walk' the sewage uphill (pretty crappy start to Megan's Mother's Day!), children running amok and Daphne walking all through the truck with her muddy shoes on, and finally trying to exit without completely destroying the trailer's axel in the ditches on either side of the driveway! We eventually made it out, but not in time to make it to church :(
Fast forward through 3-4 hours of beautiful, but slightly stressful (in a big rig) mountain roads we left TN, passed through the corner of GA, and landed at a Harvest Host home on the shores of Weiss Lake in Alabama. And by shores, I mean literally 10 feet from the water is where they wanted us to park the trailer. Keep in mind it's been raining for several weeks in this region and the ground was sodden. I hoped if I parked it a little uphill and further from the lake, that we wouldn't get stuck. I WAS WRONG. Dead wrong. This is where Megan's crappy Mother's Day turns into one of my worst nightmares. The shore had lots of big pine trees that felt pretty spaced out and far apart...unless you were towing a 36' trailer. I got stuck turning between 2 trees and couldn't go any further forward without crashing into a tree. And I couldn't back up because my tires just kept spinning in the mud. I was a stuck pig. I figured we'd have to wait a few weeks/months for the ground to dry out and harden again before we could get out of there.
Nathan and Sandra, our gracious, kind, patient, and Christlike hosts came to the rescue. Nathan got out his 50 year old John Deer tractor, hooked it up to the truck's hitch, and pulled us back out of the mud. We almost (within an inch) jackknifed several times. Our sway bars looked like they were going to explode under the pressure (I know you should generally remove these before trying serious backing-up maneuvering, for this very reason, but I wasn't thinking straight at the time and tbh, I don't know if we would've been able to remove them anyway, they are incredibly difficult to put on/take off unless you're level). We completely ruined their grass. And their fresh gravel entryway. In the end it took about 2 hours and 3 separate towing sessions to get us out and up to the road so we could park on the other side of their house that wasn't so soggy.
I'm not gonna lie to you, that day, I really questioned why we were doing this. Why we couldn't have just been content with our normal lives. Why we had to subject ourselves to this kind of stress! I eventually cooled off and had several good chats with close friends and family members who encouraged and supported me. Thank you Mom, Megan, Matt, and Morgan.
Phew. We're settled. Bad news: rain is forecasted for all 3 days we're here. Great. Haha. Luckily Z prayed for sunshine, and we learned that the weather is super unpredictable and changes constantly. So although we had planned to work/school/run errands that next day, it was sunny in the morning and we had to take advantage to go on a "quick" hike. We went to the Little River Falls in the morning, and falls were cool but our favorite part was the lizards. Especially this big green one with a red beard (neck flap) that we caught.
We wanted to hike down to the actual river as well, and despite Z's belly aching and D's tiredness and 2-yr-old-ness, we eventually all made it down. Found a group of kids from GA cliff jumping and learned from them that the river was about 3 ft higher than normal, and you could usually walk across it, but not then. It started raining and we headed back up. We made it back in one piece and in relatively good spirits (a goal we are actively working on and making good headway in)! On the way home we split up to do laundry and go shopping (it can't all be fun and games!).
The next day it was again sunny in the morning, so I broke out our inflatable kayaks for their maiden voyage. Of course, by the time we got everyone in swimsuits and the kayaks pumped up and ready to go, the clouds had rolled it haha, but it was still a really fun time, even if it drizzled a bit. We chased herons around the lake, heard tons of frogs, and D took a nap in my lap. Q also fell asleep about 2 minutes before we got back to shore; typical ;)
We tried our hand at fishing as well, but the closest we got here was a big 'un breaking my line haha. The kids enjoyed watching our host's cousin catch a bunch of catfish though. And hunting for catalpa tree worms (catalpa sphinx catepillars) to use for bait. They were all over the catalpa trees (no duh) by the chicken coop. Which, of course, was our kids' favorite part, playing with our host's chickens and dogs.
I almost forgot, our second disaster here was the ants. We must've parked on top of 10 ant hills, because we had hundreds and probably thousands of ants infest our trailer/home. That just about pushed Megan over the edge haha. Needless to say, we invested in some ant traps and Raid and our ant levels have since normalized.
The morning we departed, I knew we wouldn't make it out without destroying their grass [again] and needing towed, so I didn't even try. Our host was again kind enough to pull out his John Deere to pull us out and send us on our way.
In case you haven't guessed already, Neat Person Spotlight #5 is Nathan and Sandra, our hosts. They've lived in Alabama forever and owned this little spot on the lake for about 30 years. He works servicing heaters, so basically has the summers off. They've hosted hundreds of RVers over the past 3 years and they don't do it for money. They just enjoy meeting new people and helping whoever they can. They are seriously two of the nicest people we've ever met. In addition to Nathan literally pulling us out of the mud, they also played with the kids, and Sandra even crocheted us a couple wash cloths.
PS - if you loved the look of this lake, on our kayak tour, we found a lakefront house for sale, it was only like $500k! We think it's so cheap mainly because the driveway to get down to the house must be at least a 50 degree angle haha. A lot of these lake/mtn houses we've seen out here have the steepest driveways we've ever seen!
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