Our First Mail Failure

As we have noted previously, we use a mail forwarding service to handle all of our “snail mail”.  Everything goes to a mailbox in Texas and is forwarded to us when we tell them to, wherever we are staying put for awhile.  And sometimes when we have an extended stay, we take the opportunity to have order up some items and have them shipped to us if the campground allows that.

While in southern Alabama, we had some parts for the motor home shipped to us out of Oregon general delivery at the local post office.  The pack was supposed to arrive within 7 days, a few days ahead of our departure.  But 10 days later it still hadn’t arrived and we were scheduled to leave the the next day.  We could have stayed, but the next day was Sunday, and Monday was a Veteran’s Day Postal holiday and we didn’t have any information from the tracking data that indicated when it was ever going to get there anyway.

We went to the Post Office to see what they could do for us, fearful that we might just be out of the $50 cost of the parts.  They indicated that they normally don’t forward such packages, but agreed that under these circumstances they owed us a forward and would do so.  We hope when we get to Texas and the home of our our mail forwarding box that the package/parts will be there.

Mobile Bay

We were in the Mobile Bay area for the entire time we stayed in southern Alabama but didn’t get to the city of Mobile until our last weekend.  We had been to the city of Fairhope on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay a few times as our campground was close to Fairhope.  One thing that we always noticed about Fairhope was that they had beautiful flower planter boxes throughout the town.  It gave an already pretty town nice splashes of color.

For our trip around the bay, we drove south to the Gulf at Gulf Shores.  We followed the shore line west only to find out that we hadn’t paid enough attention to the map that that the shore drive didn’t go through, so we had to circle back to Gulf Shores and just a bit north to get a road that would go through.  But the houses along the Gulf were very colorful and we enjoyed our detour.

 

We took the ferry that traverses the mouth of Mobile Bay from Fort Morgan in the east to Dauphin Island on the west.  One bay thing about a ferry is that if you arrived just a couple minutes after the ferry has left the dock, you have quite a wait until the next sailing (somehow we know this).  There are oil drilling platforms in the Bay right along the ferry route.  It was also through these waters that produced one of the most famous naval commands of all time:  “damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead”  issued by
Admiral Farragut in attacking the bay during the Civil War’s battle of Mobile. After a quick look around Dauphin Island we headed north across a bridge with a very steep ramp section to move up to Mobile.  It was dark by the time we actually arrived in Mobile so we just had dinner without much exploring.  But we did drive drive through Mobile in the daylight as we headed west to Mississippi.  You first take a long bridge across the northern end of Mobile Bay.  Upon reaching an island just east of Mobile you pass down through the George C. Wallace tunnel under the water and under a major shipping channel of the Port of Mobile.  You can’t help but think, what if one of this ships happened to hit the tunnel, but thank goodness it didn’t happen to us.

 

 

Thank You

We are thankful for all of the condolences we received about the death of Gary’s mother.  When living on the road and in an electronic age, condolences are conveyed in many different manners – via a blog, on Facebook, in emails, through phone calls, and in person at the funeral home.  But no matter what the medium, they were appreciated in a sad and tough time.

We received the call from Gary’s brother one day and were on the road the next.  Our trip from our campground in southern Alabama to Indiana and back totaled 1800 miles and we spent 5 nights in three different motels.  We had to take Alley cat with us.

Many people came by the funeral home and attended the funeral and funeral dinner.  Gary and his brother and sister each shared at the funeral one of their many memories of their mother.

You don’t sleep well in a period like this and with all the travel, we were extremely tired.  But we have recovered and have explored the local area a bit more before we start moving across Mississippi and Louisiana to Texas.

Maryellen (Borden) Boone–August 3, 1922–October 29, 2012

 

Gary’s mother passed away on Monday.  She was 90 years old.  She had some sort of seizure – a heart attack or a stroke – and expired before the nursing home where she lived could even arrange an ambulance to take her to a hospital.  We now are on our way back in the car from southern Alabama to Indiana for the funeral.

 

 

 

 

As we reported in an earlier blog post, about a month ago we spent a week in Indiana visiting her each day at the nursing home.  We had all of the pictures from her home scanned and shared some pictures most days with her on the iPad.  She enjoyed looking at them and the memories they stirred in her.  She had said on an earlier visit that she would love to have a kitty sit on her lap that she could pet and we took Alley cat with us one day to her room.  We shared a peach pie we had made along with some ice cream.  We shared the stories of our travels with her and it stuck with her that we were going to visit the Louisville Slugger factory and museum.  Gary called her on Sunday, the day before she passed.  She asked if we had bought a baseball bat in Louisville.

She grew up on a farm south of Peru, Indiana.  She married her high school sweetheart, George.  They were married for 57 years at the time of his death in 1999.  For 87 years, she always lived within five miles of where she first lived as a child.  She was a family farm wife.  She raised three children.  She worked in the fields as well as taking care of the house and vegetable and flower gardens (she was one of the premier gardeners of the County.).  She was a faithful member of the First Christian Church and was active in church, community and school-related activities.  She was famous for her chicken and noodles, as finely hand cut as any noodles could be.  She was also famous for her pound cake.  She managed alone the farm and home for 10 years after George’s death.  Failing health and a robbery in her home at club point forced her into retirement communities, first in assisted living and then a nursing home in the final three years of her life.  She was the last of an era.  All of her brothers, sisters and in laws and most of the neighborhood farmers and their wives preceded her in death.  She is survived by three children, six grandchildren, and three great grandchildren.

Pensacola And Another Air Museum

It was just last month that we were in Dayton, Ohio and took in the Air Force Museum.  Well, come to find out that here on the Gulf Coast there is the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, Florida.  As long as we were headed over that way for a few reasons, we took in the Navy’s air museum.  What are the differences in the planes?  The Navy has a lot more planes that have pontoons on them and many that have folding wings to take up less room on aircraft carriers.  There aren’t as many heavy lift planes either.

The Museum houses the plaques of the Naval Air Hall of Fame which included such famous inductees as John Glenn and former President George H. W. Bush.  The Pensacola Naval Air Station is the home of the flying troupe, The Blue Angels.  They will be performing a homecoming show next weekend and we might just journey back over there.

Pensacola Beach had yet more of this fantastic fine white sand and we have been loving this 80 to 85 degree weather which after two glorious weeks finally has given way to a windy cold front from the north.

NO CUSSIN’!

We are staying at Escapees Rainbow Plantation Campground in Summerdale, Alabama.  It is about 20 miles north from the Gulf Coast and about equal distance from Mobile, Alabama and Pensacola, Florida.   This is the second Escapees park we have stayed at.  Escapees is the organization of full-time RVing that we belong to and does our mail forwarding for us.  The park is a fairly mature one and has lots of well placed trees.  The only problem is that they are oak trees and it’s the time of the year when the acorns are falling.

One of the first days here we drove down to Gulf Shores to the beach.  The beach has the whitest, finest sand we have ever seen.  The Gulf’s water are still warm and the beach shows no ill effects at all of the BP oil spill.

There is a lot of cotton growing down in this region.  We saw some cotton last year in northern Mississippi, but there seems to be a lot more of it here in southern Alabama and it seems to be growing better here as well.  We are still a fascinated a bit with cotton growing as it was something we never saw in the north.

Now about the CUSSIN” --the people here are very friendly and polite. Lot’s of yes, Ma’ams and no Sirs.  We went to a restaurant one night and they had a list of rules on their menu.  It was mainly the usual stuff, no smoking, proper attire, no pets, etc.  But they had one rule we hadn’t seen before:  “Don’t teach the little ones any new words; keep the language clean, we are a family restaurant.  NO CUSSIN"’!

Nashville And On To The Alabama Gulf Coast

Out next stop after Louisville was Nashville.  Our normal practice is to drive around 200 miles and stay for at least a week.  Why?  It is quite a bit a work to set up and then break down camp.  Also, it is very expensive to run the motor home down the road but only one day of driving amortized into a week’s stay makes it far more affordable.  Further, driving the motor home is a lot of work.  It’s not sports car steering with a single hand on the wheel knowing it is going to track right down the lane.  A big motor home doesn’t have precise steering.  It wanders a bit and has to be corrected and the driver’s focus must always be on the road or it will be on a lane line before you know it.  And it is tough on the kitty who has to ride in her little “house” so she can’t become a projectile under hard braking.

Gary does the campground planning checking three different sources for each upcoming campground to find the best blend of accessibility, features, and cost.  Overall, his campground planning and choices have been outstanding.  But Nashville was one destination where it just didn’t work out well.  He selected the State Fair Grounds for our stop.  We had stayed at the State Fairgrounds in Raleigh, North Carolina and it was a fine stay.  The Tennessee Fairgrounds Camp had a couple good recent reviews, was in a great location for exploring the city, and had full hookups.  But in reality it was nothing more than hookups on a crappy asphalt parking lot.  We just could not imagine staying there a week.  Moreover, we were wanting to get to some warm weather again.  So we decided to spend just one night at the Fairgrounds, made our one trip into the city, and split the next morning.  It took two more days and an overnight in a Walmart parking lot, but after three consecutive days of 200+ mile driving days, we now are here in the very south of Alabama about 20 miles from the Gulf Coast.  And it was 85 when we got there.