This weekend around 150 folks from church went camping at Fall Creek Falls. It’s a 10+ year tradition, something that I’ve been a part of for around 3 years. Seems to get bigger each year, with more and more families coming, and more and more people upgrading to campers.
I think our worship service Sunday morning at Fall Creek Falls was how God would have wanted worship. We traded our suits and ties for shorts and t-shirts. Our pews were folding lawn chairs. Our big screen was the clouds in the sky. Just a simple worship service in a wooded campground. I’m sure if you took away the pop-up campers, the Winnebagoes, and the lawn chairs, it would have looked very similar to how the early Christians would have worshipped.
Sunday at lunchtime it rained. Rather than sit in the tent all day, I decided to drive toward the park exit and found myself heading toward Pikeville. With 2 restaurants, one being a McDonald’s, I decided to try to find more variety in Crossville. Crossville is a wannabe Cookeville. No doubt both cities are rivals of sorts. In Crossville I found myself in one of the most run-down Long John Silver’s in the state. The furniture looked as though they came from a Goodwill swapmart. The floor behind the counter was dirty and in full view of the customers. They served Coca-cola, which is a rarity among the Yum! branded restaurants (sister restaurants being Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC). I began to think that the LJS was probably an independent (read non-corporate) owned entity, which hadn’t yet gotten the corporate memo to serve Pepsi and to clean up their dining room. I should have gone to the Wendy’s down the block.
Perhaps due to directional insufficiencies and shear laziness, I didn’t get to see the Falls. I drove around trying to find the lookout and Buzzard’s Roost Monday afternoon, but never did succeed. I gave up and drove toward Spencer.
I’ve always had a fascination toward Buzzard’s Roost after being introduced to it 9 years ago at a church camp at Fall Creek Falls. I had revisited it a handful of times, both physically and through photographs since then. There is a safe area, a deck built by the road, then just in front of the deck, is a rock outcrop. Merely taking too many steps in the wrong direction would mean falling a few hundred feet to the bottom of the valley.