Author: sandcastle

When we travel we pick a theme, usually a scenic or historic road, and focus on the things relating to it. We are now south. It is winter. We want to STAY south. We couldn’t find a scenic or historic route around here that does that. So we picked our own:  Military Memories.

We are planning to visit each of the stateside bases at which Dave was stationed back in the mid 1960s. We are doing them in geographical, not chronological, order. So here’s Fort Rucker, Alabama, where we spent the first five months of our marriage.

We lived in a small mobile home park on the road between Enterprise, Alabama, and the fort. Downtown Enterprise hasn’t changed much but everything around it has. The town is now big enough to have a ring road around it where the WalMart and restaurant row are. But in the middle of downtown is this statue:

It celebrates the boll weevil. Yup, celebrates an insect. The boll weevil killed the cotton crop causing the farmers to diversify their plantings. Dothan, Alabama, the town on the other side of the fort, is now the Peanut Capitol. Their statue is, of course, a peanut.

Fort Rucker is still an active Army base. To get on the base we had to provide photos IDs, vehicle registration, and proof of vehicle insurance. Plus, dodge the barricades that are part of today’s Army. Plus, we had to let the gate guard enter our RV to be sure we were the only people on board it.

Here’s what we went to see:

Below is the first type of helicopter Dave flew. I knew this as a 23; I recognize it by the tail coming out the bottom and pointing up. Sorry about the lack of sharp focus. Maybe Dave was remembering being nervous about his first flight when he took this one.

This is a Huey. This is what he flew the year he spent in Viet Nam. He only got shot once but I barely survived it.

This is a 55. I learned to recognize it by thinking of an orange with a pencil stuck into it. This is what Dave spend two years after Viet Nam teaching other soldiers to fly. That was easier on my nerves as long as I didn’t think about the fact that his students came in knowing nothing about flying helicopters.

This is what today’s soldiers looks like:

Notice the shirts not tucked in. And the boots that don’t have to be spit shined. And rubber soles instead of leather which make standing and marching easier on the feet. Even the sides of those boots are soft instead of that hard leather that rubbed your ankle bones raw. The things the Army will do to recruit soldiers nowadays.

TTYL,

Linda

Watching a hurricane approach is like watching a two-year old take a walk. It takes its own sweet time. It wanders here and there. You cannot predict what it is about to do.

Why were we watching Hurricane Ida approach? Because we were staying at Rainbow Plantation in Summerdale southeast of Mobile, Alabama, and Ida was headed our way. We had to decide what to do about that.

Several people had already left Rainbow Plantation but some were preparing to stay. The guy next to us staked down his satellite dish. The guy across from us filled the water tank in his huge 5th wheel trailer to help give it more weight then hooked up his HDT (read semi truck) to act as an anchor.

Another guy was just pulling into Rainbow Plantation having previously been parked on the beach. I don’t know about you but if I was moving inland to escape a hurricane I wouldn’t stop at 9:30 a.m. let alone at a park others were leaving.

We decided to leave. Our next challenge was where to go. Our first impulse was Jackson, Mississippi, but that was further than we wanted to go if we didn’t have to go that far to be safe. Plus our favorite campgrounds there are all on rivers and the rivers are threatening to flood. Why would we exchange one natural disaster for another?

Dave said Montgomery, Alabama, looked like it would just get rain so we headed there. With no reservations, of course. We don’t make reservation even in these conditions. Who knows how far we’ll get before we decide that’s enough?

Gulf Shores State Park was south of us. It’s campground had a mandatory evacuation. Dave talked to one of the evacuees at a gas station in Greenwood on our way to Montgomery. He said some people left their RVs in the park and went to a motel. He and most others pulled out. He was headed for a park in Greenwood which had told him it was a good thing he called ahead for reservations since they were filling quickly.

So we went on to Montgomery hoping we could get into one of the parks on my list. We did. We are at The Woods RV Park where it is raining–surprise, surprise. It’s supposed to rain for two nights and one day. After the first night it looks like this:

But we’ve been in rainstorms like this before and the winds are no worse than many we’ve experienced so I think we did the right thing. A friend who stayed at Rainbow Plantation said it was REALLY blowing hard there yesterday evening. I hope they and everyone else who chose to stay are OK this morning.  I’m glad we are.

TTYL,

Linda

I have a friend, Nick, who also writes a travel blog. Nick likes to rant about things other than travel but he didn’t like messing up his blog with them. So he started a new blog called Bad Nick. He does his ranting there and, so far, after having thought about his points for awhile I have agreed with each of them. But, I don’t want to start a new blog so, if you don’t want to listen to Bad Linda, you can stop reading now.

The Natchez Trace is a National Park. That means the bumper sticker that says, “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do own the road,” is technically true. All U.S. citizens jointly own the Natchez Trace. That doesn’t mean we have the right to treat is as if it belongs to any one of us. Today I saw several people act as if it was theirs to do with as they chose. That bugged me enough to decide to tell you about it.

The first was actually a disconnected group of people. We were driving through the Jackson, Mississippi, metropolitan area. There are a lot of roads that cross under the Trace in the area. Locals obviously use the Trace to get from one of those roads to another. Please, remember the reason the Trace is here is so tourists can learn about our history. So those city people who are hurrying from one place to another have no right to be upset with the RVers who slow down for every little turnout. The turns are narrow and our RVs are large; we have to slow down to make those turns so we can learn about the history that brought us here. If you are in such a hurry that you need to zip around the RVs unsafely, please, take a different route. This is a parkway not a thruway, people.

Each entrance to the Trace has a sign that tells everyone that commercial vehicles are not allowed and that only recreational hauling may be done on the Trace. In the literature a commercial vehicle is defined as one displaying any name of a business on the outside of the vehicle.

In one pull-off we saw a pickup truck driver trying to re-secure his load. The load was Hefty brand paper plates and Charmin toilet paper. Lots and lots of both. A pickup bed full of those two items. He had a bunch of the paper plates unloaded and he was strapping down the TP. Apparently, such lightweight items did not want to stay in the bed of his truck but there was no way he was going to get anywhere near all of his load into the cab. Recreational hauling, right? Somewhere today there is a huge party where hundreds of people are being served plates full of prunes.

The final one was another pickup truck. It had a mattress and box springs in the bed. And a U-Haul trailer hitched to the back. I hadn’t realized that U-Haul is not a commercial entity. And that there are people who think moving their household goods is a recreational activity.

Live and learn, I guess.

TTYL,

Linda

We’ve had some lousy internet so I’ve a bit of catching up to do. We’ll start today’s posts at the Tenn-Tom Waterway.

Look carefully and you’ll see LOTS of turtles on the logs in the water.

To finish this batch of pictures here’s some of our neighbors in the Jeff Busby campground on the Natchez Trace to help you make the transition from that time to this.

TTYL,

Linda

Buzzard Roost Spring & Chickasaw Levi Colbert’s nearby stand:

That’s all we saw on day two because we detoured off the Trace to WalMart in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Then we stopped early at Tishomingo State Park because it is supposed to rain for the next three days so we wanted to be somewhere with hookups so we could do lots of computer stuff without having to run the generator. So for a discounted $13 a night we are parked on a concrete pad with water and electricity and across the road from a laundry. We have a super fast internet connection but neither cell phone works. Weird. And the sun is shining brilliantly.

TTYL,

Linda