CuRVWander

The first part of our day was going great.  We locked in a reservation for a place to stay and play for the winter and we only have a two hour drive to get to our next stopover, Mandeville, Louisiana.  Mandeville will be our home base for the next two or three days for day-tripping into New Orleans.  We want to spend some time exploring the Garden District   and the historic cemeteries St. Louis Cemetery No 1 and Lafayette Cemetery No 1 . As a bonus, our drive is along some beautiful Gulf Coast scenery.  One of the sights is Mobile Bay.  Interstate 10 crosses the bay towards its north end where it is narrower.  Still, even at the narrow end the bridge is seven miles long.  In addition to being long it is also narrow and crowded.  We had just cleared the ground and were fully over water, and that's where our day took an unwanted turn. We heard a big FOOMP! sound followed by the tire pressure monitor alarming and flashing lights for the lef...

Our babysitting weekend is done, we are re-engaging our plans for moving west to Texas.  First stop, Rainbow Plantation, Summerdale, AL.  Rainbow Plantation is an ESCAPEES park in a small town just north of Gulf Shores, AL.  We have never been to this park but wanted to give it a try and look at it as a potential place to winter over starting next January. The drive from Chatt Bend is a bit longer than we like to do at one time, coming in right at seven hours.  Our preference is to be done with driving for the day in four or five hours.  But having stayed an extra week beyond our planned departure day we opted to skip the short drive.  Still, we got in while the office was open, got checked in, set up and drove almost all the way to Gulf Shores for dinner, all before it got dark. Our dining establishment for the evening (we were looking for seafood) was recommended to us by the camp host.  She said Fish River Grill #2 would fix us about anything w...

One thing about being a fulltimer is that you have to be flexible.  It is a rare day that you make a hard schedule (regarding where you will stay, when you will get there or when you will leave) because things change.  And so it is with our departure from Chattahoochee Bend State Park.  Our last day of being volunteer camp hosts is still May 31st but our departure day of June 1st is now history.  At nearly the last minute our daughter and son-in-law asked us to keep the grand baby so they could have one last weekend away before we leave.  But the weekend in question was a week after we were supposed to be gone.  There was no chance that we would say no to having the baby all to ourselves one more time, even if it means changing our plans by a week. So now we will pull off our camp host site on the first day of June and move a grand total of about 500 yards to campsite #111, a pretty back-in site with great views of the woods and a clear shot at the satell...

We have been campground hosts at Chattahoochee Bend State Park (Georgia) going on a year now.  For a volunteer position this is a long time, most volunteer host jobs are three months with a long gig maybe stretching to six months.  A year is especially long when your hosting duties include daily bath house cleaning.  Which in this case means about 2,000 square feet of toilets, showers, sinks and floors that have to be scrubbed, mopped and disinfected every day. Then there is the seven months of growing season when the campground has to be mowed every week.  There is about 11 acres of surface that has to be mowed in campground #1.  This is not to say that all of that acreage is vegetated.  There is a lot of bare, red Georgia clay between clumps of grass.  Chatt Bend is a relatively new park and it has a long way to go before all the bulldozered campsite building is fully revegetated. In an attempt to cover some of the bare clay, we put down over...