Seven Points Campground in Mt. Juliet, TN April 9 – 16, 2025

We left Sawnee Campground outside of Cumming, Georgia on Wednesday, April 9, 2025 at 10:30 am, which was right on schedule but NOT without a small issue. When we got ready to lock the door on Nomad using our electronic keypad, we discovered the batteries in the lock had died and I had no replacements on hand. No problem, we’ll just use the manual key. Except that it took us 10 minutes to find the key because, instead of putting a copy on each of our key rings when we first installed the lock 3 years ago, we had hidden the set in the console of Voyager and then forgotten we had done so. Once we solved that problem, we were on our way to Seven Points Campground in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee for a 7-night stay.

Reckless Truck Driver

Driving there took us into the Central Time Zone and we arrived at 3 pm. Again though, not without some issues. There was an extremely reckless truck driver who cut us off twice in the space of an hour with his sudden lane changes. I mean running us off the road and me having to slam on the brakes so hard I thought Nomad was going to flip over us. Cindy managed to take a photo of his license plate and the side of his door with his trucking company information. I plan to send those pieces of information and an account of his dangerous driving to both the Department of Transportation and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which took over for the ICC when it was abolished in 1995.

Although who knows; by the time you read this both of THOSE regulatory agencies may have been “DOGE’d” by the current administration.

More Problems

We backed into our site at Seven Points and were going to unhitch when we discovered that the new tongue jack I had installed at our last stop was not working. It worked when we left Sawnee, but now 5 hours later it would not even make a sound. Completely dead. If you’ll remember in our last post I mentioned I had broken some connection while installing the new tongue jack. Apparently whatever I broke finally decided to stop working. I had to get out the manual crank and give myself a major arm, shoulder and chest workout cranking the tongue jack up by hand. And now I’ve got to figure out what is wrong with the jack during this stay.

The site had two levels, one for the main pad and one for the area of the picnic table, fire pit, etc. When we put down our front door steps we found I had to hyperextend the legs of the steps to provide a solid base onto the lower level. We’re used to adjusting the legs an inch or two at different sites, but this was the first time we’ve had to extend the legs about 10 inches for solid footing.

Then, when I went to hook up the water hose, I found that we were 6 inches too far from the connection for the hose to reach. Fortunately, I had a 3 foot extension hose that I could attach to our main hose to make the connection. I also had another brand new 25-foot water hose I carry as a spare, but I would have hated to unpack that just to get an extra foot of hose.

However, that would not be the end of the water hose issue and I’ll tell you more about that later in the post.

Then, while setting things up inside Nomad, Cindy discovered we had no power from our house batteries. Both 12-volt batteries were registering dead so we had no onboard power if something happened to our shore power. Now I had to figure out what happened to the batteries and it seemed that it must have something to do with the new tongue jack and the broken connection that seemed fine at the time of the install.

J. Percy Priest Lake

After setting up Nomad and having dinner, we took Bella on a walk around the rather large campground and lakeshore of the J. Percy Priest Lake. You might have heard that this area of the country had been experiencing a lot of severe weather and flooding the past few weeks. Cindy had wisely called the campground before we left Sawnee asking if they were having any flooding issues that would necessitate the closure of the campground. The ranger advised us that the lake level had been dropped by the Corps of Engineers to avoid any flooding.

Still, the lake level seemed to be pretty high, as you can see in the photo showing the walkway at the boat ramp covered in water. Along the shore we could also see the water level was higher than normal as grass and tree trunk bases were covered in water.

J. Percy Priest Lake is named after the late Congressman James Percy Priest and was completed by the USACE in 1967. It is 42 miles long, 14,200 acres in size, and is 100 feet deep at its deepest point near the dam. There are 24 public use areas including picnic areas, campgrounds, boat ramps, comfort stations, and four commercial marinas on the lake.

Part of Thursday morning was spent on a call with our friend Kirk. Just spent a little more than an hour tossing ideas back and forth and talking about a project he has been working on. This is something we’ve done on occasions over the years. I always enjoy discussing these things with him and hope I can give him a layman’s perspective on some of the technology aspects of which he is a master.

Severe Weather

First though, in the “Name that matches the job” category; Nashville’s ABC TV station has a meteorologist named Danielle Breezy.

We had been watching the weather forecast for the previous few days and knew that severe weather would be coming through our area with the possibility of tornadoes Thursday night. We had our go bags ready and sure enough we were hit with high winds, pounding rains and lots of lightning between 5:30 and 6:45. Thankfully, we made it through unscathed and without having to evacuate.

Then, around 8:15 we heard a loud “BANG” when a transformer blew and all the power in our section of the campground went off. It was well after the storm had blown through. We’ve been through this before and it’s usually a squirrel touching both posts on the transformer which blows the transformer and incinerates the risky rodent. In most cases we would then use our onboard batteries until power was restored, but we had no onboard battery power, so we broke out our battery-powered lanterns.

Our campsite was about 300 feet or so from the parking area near the boat ramp, which was the general area that the sound of the transformer blowing came from. Around 8:30 we saw vehicles with flashing red lights pull into the pitch black parking lot. I remember thinking they sure got power crews out there in a hurry. The vehicles were there until shortly after midnight. We still had no power and I thought they had given up for the night and would resume repairs in the light of morning.

I was right that they had given up for the night, but not for the reason I thought. We would learn the awful truth the next morning…

Tragic Drowning

The trucks were back shortly after sunrise Friday morning and power was restored at 6:54 am. Then 9 minutes later, at 7:03 am, a different transformer blew and we were without power again until 9:14 am.

In the meantime, we learned that the vehicles with flashing lights the night before had been rescue crews, looking for a kayaker who had not returned before the storms hit. He and his wife were camping in a class C camper truck two sites down from us on the opposite side of the road.

The 73-year old man and his wife from Pittsburgh, PA had been out kayaking earlier in the day. She said they returned around 3:30 pm to the boat ramp, but that he said he wanted to explore some more in his kayak and told her he would be back by 7:30 pm. The storm came through and when he did not return by 8:00 pm she alerted authorities. They searched for him until midnight Thursday, then returned at first light Friday morning and located his body around 7:00 am.

When Cindy and I heard the news, she just reached for me and I for her and we hugged each other tightly, thankful that we still had each other. It is one of those quirks of human nature that you can be so sad for someone else’s loss, but also so happy that it was not your loss.

As of this writing, the investigation is still ongoing and no cause of death has been released.

Continuing our own list of issues during this trip, during the second power outage Friday morning I got out our generator, but it would not start. I thought it might need a new spark plug, but when I replaced that a couple of days later it still would not start. All of our stops this year have shore power, but I like to have the generator for power loss emergencies like the one we had at this stop.

That night we finished watching season 4 of “The West Wing” on DVD. On a related note; earlier in the day LinkedIn sent me a recommendation for a connection with a former FEMA colleague who was a writer in our External Affairs department. I can only remember working one disaster with this gentleman, but what made me laugh was that on his LinkedIn profile he put “Special Assistant to Toby Ziegler” (one of the main characters on The West Wing who was the head speech writer for the President) as his position and under “About” he wrote, “Toby, Josh and Sam showed us how it could be if somebody cared.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Saturday was a day of errands and that night we started season 5 of “The West Wing” during dinner. And, of course, Sunday was “Happy Tax Day” across the United States.

The Hermitage

Monday morning we headed 10 miles north to The Hermitage, home of our country’s 7th President, Andrew Jackson, for a 9:30 am tour. You can see photos from our visit in this post’s photo album. We spent about 2 hours touring the home and grounds before heading back to Nomad.

That afternoon we had a Mobile RV Tech come out to look at what I had done when installing the new tongue jack to see if he could figure out what I had broken. It turned out that the connection I had broken when trying to loosen the old tongue jack wire was to a circuit breaker. You can see a phot of it in the album. It was mounted up in the frame in a hard to reach and hard to see spot. With that connection/part broken the 12-volt onboard batteries were not being charged, so nothing that depended on them, like the tongue jack, would work.

The circuit breaker was a $15 part. It cost us $300 in time and expertise to identify the problem and replace it with a new part. But afterward, everything started working again. So, while expensive, it was worth it.

Tuesday we went grocery shopping for the following week since we wouldn’t be near a store at our next stop, fueled up Voyager and started packing up to leave the following day.

Just for fun, I made a list of all the magazines I read each week and month. You can see them here, if you’d like.

Remember what I said earlier about having another problem with the water hose? On this stop we needed to fill our fresh water tank before leaving because our next campsite would have no water. So Tuesday afternoon I needed to fill our fresh water tank. But the intake for that tank is even farther from the one where our fresh water comes into Nomad that I had to use the 3 foot extension to reach when we arrived.

That meant I had to break out the brand new water hose anyway so that I could reach the fresh water tank intake. Not a huge problem, just one more little one adding to the sum.

So, this was one of the most problem-ridden trips we have had in a while. It seemed that so much went wrong; from the door lock to the reckless truck driver to the new tongue jack not working to the house batteries being dead to the water hose to the generator to the expense of the tongue jack repair.

But, of course, none of those compared to the unexpectedly tragic loss of a life of someone just doing what we’re doing; traveling around in a camper enjoying the simpler things and living life.

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