Day 6 Travelling to Shepherd State Park MS
Travelling day. Up early about 7:00. Made coffee took dogs for walk. Gina got up and cooked breakfast. Alarm went off again and Remi freaked, couldn’t get him back inside. Day was warm in the 60’s. finally got internet thanks to Jack’s tip about using cell phone for personal hotspot. Posted for first time since we left to RV rolling. Got on line did some OT work, bank reconciliation etc. put the battery in the trailer and tried to get hitch lock to work – no good. Finally started to breakdown about 10:00. Took us two hours – we made a vow to figure out how to shorten this. The main things in breakdown are: 1. Secure the inside of the RV – gina did all of this – everything on the walls must come down, the kitchenette table taken down, put away all kitchen utensils and appliances, strap down loose furniture. The outside requires packing up all outside furniture, pulling up the stabilizer jacks, flushing out the grey and black water tanks, putting away the sewer hoses, disassemble water hose, pull in awning and slide out, disassemble electric, put away all stuff in hatches and truck, lock hatches and doors, then last but not least hook up the truck and trailer. We have a torsion and sway bar stabilizer so it is a little more involved than just hooking on to the ball. Once all done we were ready to roll. Chatted with some neighbors and they re-iterated Tommy’s comments about the China bombs so we plan to change tires at some point along the trip. 12:30 the RV was Rolling!
We decided to take the beach route to our next stop at Shepherds State Park in Gautier MS. After about 3 miles I asked Gina to check the route and her phone wanted us to turn around?? I stopped, looked it all over and sure enough I was heading into a dead end and turn around we did. We then were provided a few different options and decided to take the quickest except after only a couple of miles Gina said she HAD to eat something! We learned that parking an RV in any ole restaurant can present problems. 30 miles later, after veering off the quickest route we found ourselves in Fairhope AL. What a cute little town, but it was packed – no parking for even cars, let alone an RV. We decided to say screw it and headed out of town, Gina saw a Coffee shop and across the street was a bar not yet open with a big parking lot. I pulled in and Gina ran across the street to get some food, she returned with two coffee cakes and two cups of coffee, not exactly what we had in mind, but it did hold us over.
The rest of the trip was pretty monotonous, except for the pouring rain and being on I-10 with a million truckers. I got off early so we could enter Mississippi on a back road and snapped a shot of us driving by. Charlie told me when he and a college friend went on the road for 16 months they took a picture of them entering every state. I am going to try to do the same thing.
We finally arrived at SSP at 3:30 in a deluge. This park is the exact opposite of GSP. No paved roads, in the woods, the lady at front entrance just pointed to an envelope taped onto the window with our name on it. We made the loop and backed into our site, no problems, but the rain was coming down. I set up the essentials – hooked in power, put the slide out, got gina and the dogs inside put all the pics on the wall, table up…. Back in business, almost. Just when we got that done, the rains came down even harder so gina made us a Hendricks and soda and we just chilled out for 30 minutes or so. While sitting in the RV we could really “feel” the difference between a level RV and one that is tilted. In this case we were tilting very far backwards because we were on a slope. Finally the rains laid down and I went outside to finish the set up – first thing was to level off the RV. In order to do this I almost had to put the front trailer lift down completely to the ground – I had no more to give but we got her level. The downside to this was that the back of the RV was pretty high off the ground, too high in fact for the leveling jacks to touch ground. I improvised a little by turning my 2X6 plates upright. It was enough but not really solid. Our nephew Chris told me of a great RV pack from Andersen Hitches called the EZ bag, in that bag they include some leveling plates just for this that stand up about 6 inches. I should have listened to Chris! Once level, I got the water hooked up, propane on, et al and we were all set,but the rains started in again.
Gina got out Yahtzee and we played a game – I won by one straight score, She got the cards out and we played Gin (while having another gin!), I wont mention the score for fear of repercussions if you know what I mean. We decided not to cook that night and went to a Mexican restaurant in Gautier called Aztecas. We were sat in the farthest corner in the back and asked to move to the bar at a high top. No problem! We ordered some margaritas and tacos, then the band started. Two guys but they were surprisingly good, played Jason Aldean, Sammy Kershaw, Don Williams and Bad Company. We paid and headed back, The dogs were happy to see us, I walked them and we got ready for bed. I read some more Origin and Gina read Without a Trace. We were asleep by 9:00.
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