Category: Uncategorized

As a child, Dave was interested in airplanes. As teenagers, we used to go out to the Minneapolis/St Paul airport where Dave could watch the planes take off and land. As a soldier he got to fly helicopters but not fixed-wing aircraft. We no longer go watch planes take off and land but he still likes airplanes.

So, today we visited the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, Florida.

This base is the home of the Blue Angels.

They have a tour trolley Dave did not ride. They have an Imax where Dave did not go see the film. But he spent two hours looking at planes.

I stayed home and did my computer stuff and read my book after assuring him he could take all the time he needed. I think he might have stayed longer if he wasn’t concerned about getting to the post office before it closed to pick up our mail. Thanks, Tom, for recommending we stop here.

TTYL,

Linda

What we like:

What we don’t like:

TTYL,

Linda

If you have a big rig with lots of carrying capacity you can bring great stuff with you. And if you like to park that rig someplace and stay there awhile, you can expand your living space within the confines of your campsite. Our friends, Lee and Mary Jane, have done just that where they are spending the winter this year and we were the lucky beneficiaries of that on our visit to them.

Under their awning they have four chairs with end tables between each set of chairs where we sat to drink the wine we brought with us while we caught up on our adventures since our last meeting. It was nice to be comfortable without having to haul our own chairs to their site.

Inside that screen tent is a picnic table which has become Lee’s woodworking area. When they were at this park two years ago they had a hot tub in that tent but the tub didn’t survive the dry air on its visit to the Arizona desert where we all met last January. RVing can be hard on people and equipment but this site in the Florida panhandle isn’t hard to take at all. Have a good winter, guys!

TTYL,

Linda

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