Finally!

My shady campsite

The Music Stage

Finally, a beautiful weekend! I had no plans so I quickly made some! All the state parks were full but I found a private campground near Snow Camp, NC, striking distance from Saxapahaw Lake, one of my favorite paddle spots. The weather has been so bad this spring, I've barely had the camper on the road. The Canada trip is coming up and I wanted one last local trip to be sure everything was working well. Even more than that, I wanted and needed some quiet time. Forty five minutes up the road, I found it.

Cane Creek Campground is not the typical family vacation campground. There were no swimming pools or playgrounds or game rooms. Instead, it is home to the annual Little John's Mountain Music Festival and is set up to accommodate the festival crowd. There are a few long-term campers in residence, a few available sites with electricity and water for passers-by like me, showers, pit toilets, the stage, and lots of parking and tent camping spaces for the festival weekend. It is a lovely, quiet place  (on any weekend EXCEPT the festival) and I had a good stay. The weather was perfect--sunny, breezy and mild. I had a spot in the shade overlooking a pond. My neighbors were quiet and I was reasonably close to the things I wanted to do.

Headwaters of the Haw

My daughter's work schedule has prevented us from doing much trip planning for Canada. She's been
pretty stressed by the extra hours her employer has requested and I've been concerned for her. I called her Friday night and suggested we meet at the Haw River State Park to walk her dog and do some catching up. She'd told me about the trails there. It's a relatively new state park and I was interested to see it. I had no idea until I pulled in that it was the former Brown Summit Conference Center for the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina where I'd attended retreats in earlier years. A schism in the church caused it to be sold and the state purchased it in the early 2000s. The original conference center had 210 acres associated with it. The state has added another 1200 acres and has transformed the conference center buildings into the first residential Environmental Education Center in North Carolina.

Sunset Saxapahaw Lake

There is a small lake just off the main lodge and trails that branch out from the road around the lake. One leads to a boardwalk through a swamp and ends in an observation deck overlooking a roiling stream that is the headwaters of the mighty Haw River. The area is rich in both plant and animal life and we saw lots of interesting wetland plants in bloom. Just up the road in Reidsville, we found a great Mexican place for lunch and worked out plans for our Canadian adventure.

After a nap and some time to read, I started dinner and prepared for a visit from my friend, Ruthie. She has never paddled at night. The Haw River Canoe and Kayak Company (HRCKC) in Saxapahaw runs monthly Full Moon Paddles on Saxapahaw Lake, an empoundment of the Haw River

Moonrise over the dam

far downstream of the headwaters near Brown Summit. I learned to kayak at Sawapahaw and bought my first boat from the HRCKC folks. The first two years I had it, I made every full moon paddle the weather allowed. The river at night is both incredibly quiet and enormously full of sound. It's a totally different experience than daytime paddling and the moon is never more beautiful than rising over the water. This night was clear and mild. We paddled to a cove teeming with wildlife and sat in the dark taking in myriad sounds.

Moonlight on the Haw

So my last minute plans landed me a weekend soaking up the lovely weather, enjoying some much needed solitude, lots of outdoor beauty, and exploring new places with good people. Very worth the wait.

Stay tuned...Adventure Canada is next!