NOMADS – Sumatanga 2022 Week 1 – RVing With a Purpose

Sunday October 9, 2022

Busy, busy since last blog entry two weeks ago. After spending a full day in the service bay on Monday, we also spent most of the day Tuesday. It seems most of our problems have been solved. There are still a couple of small issues we will take care of at a later date. We simply didn’t have time to deal with them right then. We needed to get back to Alabama. Our service techs were great and if we are able to attend the June 2023 rally, they plan to get us back in after the rally to make a few more adjustments. We departed Middlebury midafternoon Tuesday and overnighted at a great Cracker Barrel a little south of Indianapolis. We hit the road again early Wednesday morning (enjoyed a good CB breakfast) and arrived back on Pine Mountain in time to get a good afternoon walk and begin transferring all the dirty clothes, food, etc. over to Fred. Thursday was routine dental appointments and completing the unloading of BB and working on Helen’s house. Friday was laundry and readying Fred for three weeks at Camp Sumatanga.

Saturday morning (Oct. 1) we completed our packing and headed to Camp. It was so great to see our wonderful friends Dave and Rita. We haven’t worked with them since Covid and really look forward to spending time with them while working at the Camp. Our leaders are Scott and Teresa who we enjoyed visiting with at annual meeting and we look forward to working with them for the next three weeks. We began our work at the camp repairing the ceiling at the McBee pavilion. We also cleaned and changed light bulbs in the ceiling fans, repaired the roof, a toilet, and painted fascia. The ladies also tackled the floating swim platform and stained and sealed it after replacing some rotten wood. We demoed three canoe racks and all worked to begin construction of two new, heavy duty racks Thursday afternoon. It was a busy week but we accomplished a lot. It’s always good to work at Sumatanga. We camp in view of the lake and get to do our walking around the lake each day.

The old rubber flashing and tar had pulled away from the chimney allowing water to get into the ceiling. We applied roof patch to stop the leaks.

While the guys worked on removing the water damaged ceiling panels, the ladies decided to clean some of the others.

Max and Dave adding drip edge to the front of McBee pavilion to protect the fascia. We later applied a coat of the famous Sumatanga Brown paint to the fascia that was still exposed.

We also added some protection to the gable end of the roof.

It was a lot of work to remove the hundreds of screws holding the old canoe racks together.

After Rita, Teresa and Anne disassembled most of the canoe racks, the camp staff pulled the posts out of the ground.

The whole team was involved in building the new canoe racks…

… and hopefully we will finish during week 2.

Teresa staining the currently non-floating dock.

Rita, Teresa, and Anne applying sealer to the dock

One of the reasons we enjoy being at Sumatanga

Thursday evening the team went into Oneonta for a great dinner at one of the newer restaurants – Mio Sogno. Saturday there was the Blount County Covered Bridge festival and pancake breakfast. Hopefully we will have enough energy to get back to work tomorrow. It’s great to be back working a NOMADS project.