Our first week at Timber Wolf Lake (TWL) flew by, and we completed a lot of tasks!

The men had 4 shelters to clean, fix and replace wood. They also sanded down the picnic tables for us.  The ladies sanded the chairs, painted running boards, stained the chair and tables, and lacquered the indoor chairs.

We were also asked to help at the dining hall, where they needed help with cleanup. I've never seen such a well-oiled system with cleaning up places for 500 kids, dishes, cleaning tables, vacuuming floors, sanitizing tables, then resetting the tables in preparation for the next meal. 

I was also shown how to water the 80 plants around camp, which Gail and I will both do next week.  

The rains came, then we have a gorgeous sunset to finish the day!

This week was extremely busy. We ate meals with the camp workers, enjoyed working with the teens, really enjoyed praying over the tables (for the kids at that table), and also really enjoyed our time working with Perry and Gail.

The first week is under our belt already! We've met a LOT of great people here, but are also very sore (in a good way), and ready for our weekend.

We are super excited to have finally arrived at our August SOWER project, Timber Wolf Lake Camp. It's a Christian camp that have programs for ALL age levels and groups, and are currently housing over 500 middle school aged kids! Their ministry is awesome, and God has certainly had His hand in developing this camp!

As a SOWER, we are dedicating 3 weeks of volunteer work to the camp, and we aim to help them with whatever they need done, and be wherever they need us most. We are here for them these next 3 weeks, and are thrilled to do this as a ministry for God! 

The camp (TWL), provides all their volunteers with housing (if needed). There are cabins available for the longer term volunteers, and they have 12 beautiful campsites for the traveling volunteers, like us.  We are working with one other couple while here, and this is the first time for us as a 'GL' (group leader).. I hope we do a great job, but most importantly, I hope we have a super time working together with our new friends Perry & Gail.

Enjoy the photos, and please keep us in prayer for continued strength/healing from our recent run-in with Covid, and for God to use us where HE wants us. Thank you.

I have the details for each picture in their captions.

Lakeshore is our 'home resort' where we spend 3-5 weeks of our summer each year. We catch up on doctors, dentists, vet, and of course family!  This year was especially a blast, as Maria (and family) stayed a week at the resort near us, and Joe (and family) stayed with us in the camper 2 weekends!  There was a lot of time to catch up and have fun with all the kiddos!

​*Descriptions are on photo captions.

We have been planning this site and campground for a year!  Reserving site 63 at this resort meant we were at the end of the loop.. Privacy.. Beautiful view, and evening shade.. NICE!

Maria reserved most of a week with us, and we all had a great time!  Papa Mark showed them how to look for treasures, and of course we all went swimming together.  The resort itself is so peaceful and quiet. Even though it was quite a way from family, it's always nice to spend time here.

We always love arriving at the Grand Haven resort. It's a campground that's part of our membership, so we can stay up to 3 weeks for free. This year will be the first year that we're utilizing our park-hopper upgrade, so we'll see how that goes.

For my note, we stayed on site 226 this year, but we'd prefer 225 next time. We love NOT being under the trees. :-)

​A quick trip to Grand Haven is always fun, and even though it was still a little cold, we enjoyed the pier walk with new concrete!  :-)

A few photos of one of our favorite parks.. The resort is one of the oldest owned by Outdoor Adventures, and they purchased it from Yogi Bear parks. It has gorgeous trees, nicer spacious sites, and nice people. The amenities include a pool, putt putt, go carts, and a beautiful playground and activities.

To make our driving days a bit shorter, we always try to stop after 200-300 miles, then stay for a few days. We always love stopping at Arrowhead Lakes on our way home. This is a resort that is affiliated with our home resort membership. We get to enjoy the amenities of a very nice pool, putt putt, and nice daily walks.

We invited the kids down to be with us here, and Maria was able to squeeze in the time. We enjoyed the pool, putt putt and just plain catching up.  :-)

OMG! I cannot express enough how much we enjoy our bi-annual camping trips with Katie, Tony and the kids, and this was no exception. We all decided to meet up at the Mammoth Cave to give the kids a new caving experience.  The weather was super awesome (actually a little too warm), but the kids had their usual water time outside, and we all grilled, ate, and just got caught up on life. 

The cave tour was the "Domes and Dripstones" tour. A 2-hour long moderate level tour that took us through a mile of cave.  We enjoyed watching the kids see everything for the first time!

This is the 3rd cave we visited this year, and even though Mammoth is the largest, we still vote for Carlsbad as the prettiest.  :-)

​Thank you Katie & Tony for taking the time to come out and spend the night & day with us!

During our stay, on one of our trips to the garbage, we were stopped by a couple that wanted to talk about dogs.. This is pretty normal. What's not normal, was during that visit, another couple tapped us on the shoulder and told us that they had met us earlier this winter!  Where? At Palatki Heritage Site! It was within our first week there, and we had really connected with them about camping and full-time RV living.  We met up several more times during this stay, but how AWESOME to meet up with such a wonderful couple after touring half the country and five months later! I sure hope we get to visit with them more!  Thank you so much Mark & Debbie for stopping to say HI!   You definitely made our day!  :-). 
* Check out Mark & Debbie's website HERE!

Stay Details:  Mammoth Cave Campground - Mammoth Cave, Kentucky.  A dry-camping campground that has water available around each loop, and a dump station. It is a mere 10-minute walk from the Mammoth Cave visitor center which is where all tours depart. We chose site 82, which was a pull-through spot right next to the restrooms. It also gave us a very large site to house the clam tent, and 2 sleeping tents.  
The campground itself has a lot of trees, so be prepared to have very little sun, or have a generator. We needed to use our generator twice each day even though we have 1000 watts of solar. Generator hours are 8am-8pm, and the campground is VERY quiet after that. Sites are large, restrooms are clean, and cell service is minimal, but we both had enough to upload these pictures.  :-)

We have been wanting to stay here for a while. At the last minute though, we decided to reserve an electric site instead of depending on an open spot at a dispersed campground. Mostly because we're larger.  We're glad we did, as it got pretty cold at night, so we were able to use our fireplace to keep warm instead of propane.

The site at Energy Lake Campground was awesome!  Site 7 gave us a 100 degree view of the lake. Site #9 would be best if you're interested. It's for larger rigs, and provides a GREAT view of the lake at the top of the hill. 

We visited the Nature Center Zoo during our stay, and their animals were all found on the peninsula and are being rehabilitated or are injured and cannot be released.

Stay Details: Energy Lake Campground - North/east side on Land Between the Lakes, Kentucky. There are a LOT of areas on the peninsula that are dispersed camping, but only 3 campgrounds that are more modern with electric and water. This being one of them.
Out site was #7, but if we stay here again we will reserve #9. All on this loop have beautiful views of the lake, and the campground has spacious, well cared for sites.

We haven't been to Arkansas in a while, and we certainly found one of our favorite campgrounds ever!  A Corps of Engineer park, sitting on Degray Lake called Iron Mountain Campground.  There were only 5 people in this entire campground when we were there, so it was nice and quiet. Along with having great cell service, we couldn't go wrong. Will definitely be back here.

The sunset pic was taken at Walmart after the storm. Just thought it was very pretty. :-)

We have finally arrived to the camp we'll be working for 3 weeks, but not without incident. It's obvious that the Lord is keeping us safe!  On the way here, we had two VERY scary things happen.  
1) A very large chunk of rubber hit us in the middle of our windshield! We expected some serious damage from this, but after inspection, there was NO evidence of it even hitting us! Praise God!
2)  We were approaching a truck that suddenly decided to make his left turn in front of us!  Mark slammed on the brakes and God opened the path, because there were NO cars anywhere else in the intersection! Mark was able to maneuver around the passenger side of the truck and avoid this potential head-on collision! Disaster averted thank's to the many prayers from all our friends and family. THANK YOU GOD!!
- Also, thank you for the dash-cam Nate.. We were able to get the truck number and report the driver!

Finally arriving at Charis Hills Camp, we met our GL's (Group Leaders), and had a tour of the camp. Charis Hills is a camp for autistic kids, and they have a LOT of wonderful activities! We LOVE our GL's (Rob & Helen), and can hardly wait to meet everyone else and get to work!

​Saturday church also proved to be full of Devine appointments! This church had 3 autistic kids, and we were able to tell their parents about Charis Hills!  The musicians were AWESOME,  and by the time we left church, we made several friends, AND Mark is on the schedule for special music next week!  PRAISE GOD!

Needless to say, this week, and especially these past few days, have been FULL of praises! We are are VERY Blessed!