Ducktown

Saturday October 20, 2012

We all slept late this morning. By 9:00 we were up and showered and pretty much ready to start the day. Last night Betty woke up and wondered why the back of the rolling cave was so well lit. It turned out that Barney had gone to bed and had not put out the torch at the cave door. Thankfully we were plugged in and it didn’t run down the battery. Lucky for Barney!

This morning Wilma was coming out of her cave, missed the bottom step and took a pretty good spill. Her shoulder was pretty tender the rest of the day and probably will be for the next few days; no visible external damage though. Did I mention that it wasn’t a really good day?

We had breakfast of omelet, hash browns, cantaloupe and cinnamon rolls. Things were looking up.

After the dishes were done everyone piled into the Rubble-mobile and we headed out to look for a mountain and a cemetery, with the Rubble family name near Ducktown, TN. We drove east on route 64 along the Ocoee River. The Ocoee is a popular whitewater river in the area and was very busy with rafters and kayakers. They put in at a ramp just below a diversion dam with water flow flowing over the top and also flowing through a wooden aqueduct that runs several miles along side, and above the river course and runs a hydro power plant at its terminus. Several miles further up the road is a white water course that was built for the 1996 Olympics, which were held in Atlanta, GA. There was barely enough water in the course to float a kayak, let alone race one. Evidently a controlled amount of water can be turned into the course to make it a very challenging run. The natural rocks in the course were enhanced by gunnite concrete to make the course.

We went on into Ducktown looking for Barney’s roots. Barney was on what he thought was route 68. It turned out to be a more and more narrow street that crossed a bridge that Betty was not about to cross in the cave. Barney started backing down the street when a fellow came out from his house to offer us directions. His name was Gilligan and he was very nice and helpful in giving us directions, and nicknamed Betty, Princess. We picked that up fairly quickly, and have had some fun with it. We backed down the street and turned around at the Sherriff’s Office then got back to route 68.

With Gilligan’s instructions we found the road we were looking for but we were not sure of the correct turn-off from that road to Rubble Mountain. We drove on down the road to try to find Rubble Cemetery and ended up in North Carolina.  We stopped to ask a couple of people around a fire truck, and they didn’t provide much new information. They were in front of an abandoned house that they were about to burn down. 

Having worked for Barney for more than 20 years, Wilma knows firsthand how often Barney’s family name is misspelled and mispronounced, so it was not a big surprise to find an incorrect street sign. And on the map, the mountain is clearly marked with the correct spelling.

We drove around the area for several hours and were not able to pinpoint either the mountain or the cemetery so we headed back to the campground where we are once again settled in for the night.

Coming back by where the rafters put in, there was a lot less flow over the dam, and made the river look pretty tame. They just beef it up for the rafters, and get pretty good business.

Hopefully we will have a startling climax to this thrill-packed episode in a couple of days. Good night.