The Patriot

This past weekend we headed down to Sylacauga to meet up with a Land Cruiser club to do some off roading and camping. Father and I met them at the Sylacauga walmart, and after getting some gas, we headed out to the forest. The first road we took ended up being impassable after a distance in. Though it was open on the map, it clearly had not been used much as fair sized trees were growing in the middle of it.

We didn't know it at the time, but this would be a forshadowing  of things to come. We decided to go the way that Clarence and I had gone previously, which did turn out to be open. We spent quite some time in the forest, we came to many dead ends, but it was fun. There were a few sections with pretty good rocks and hills, though for the most part we were on fairly good forest service roads. Most of the roads we tried that weren't main roads were either closed or dead ends. I rather wish we had more open roads out there. Many of the truly fun roads I have been on out there are now closed. But I digress. About halfway through the day, we came to one of these dead ends. After we turned around, we got back on the main road and turned right. After going about fifty yards down the road, we noticed three of the vehicles weren't behind us. We waited for a while for them to come around the curve, but they never did. Clarence and I took my Jeep back to see if they had gotten stuck or had broken down, but they were gone. We realized they must have gone left out of the road instead of right, and that the road network was too large to find them easily. Luckily, Clarence got a text from one of the lost, and we decided to just meet them at the campsite. We proceeded through the forest, which was very pleasant. The thin dirt road wound though hollows and around hills, over creeks and through fields. At one point we had even stumbled across a closed covered bridge, which was rather cool. Eventually we made it back to Tree Farm, the large campsite we camped at last year. My sisters Olivia and Ashley and my niece Lydia met us there. 

We set up our camp, and a few people began cooking. One member of the group was a competition level bar-b-q-er. We had our enormous tent-mansion.

Before too long, the three missing trucks found the campsite as well, and some time later two more vehicles came. We had ten vehicles in all at the campsite. The people who were there were all agreeable, I thought, and the food was good. I really enjoyed the large group camp. It made me wish we had a Jeep club locally.

You can see the smoker in this picture, the black canister. He used it to smoke some chicken, which was really good. 

Father was rather glad that Rowan and Lydia came. They were really good too, one would expect small kids to be less well behaved out in the wilderness. This campsite was good for the kids too, since it was just a big field.

This blur is Lydia.

I'll have to update this again when I get the pictures from father, but this is all I have for now.

Ps: I titled this the patriot because I had the only American made vehicle there.