On the Road, Again....

Yes….I’ve been extremely tardy for the past two weeks in keeping you up to date on our travels on this blog, but I’m going to use the following excuse: we’ve been with family. That means we’ve been so darn busy, morning, noon, and night doing family events in Montgomery, Alabama with Marianne’s family for a reunion and then again in Louisville, Kentucky with the family of my daughter Nikki’s fiancé’s Cory’s family.

Oh yeah, will include some stories on them, too. . .

But first let me get you up to date. When I last left you we were in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The big adventure continues:

The Four Gentleman from Vicksburg
click on any photo to enlarge

When we had lunch at the Walnut Hills Restaurant round table yesterday, we sat with four gentleman who advised us that we would definitely take a side trip to Philadelphia, Mississippi and stop at the William's Brothers store which was better than Wal*Mart in their selection and pricing, and that they had the best bacon around with a couple guys standing near the front counter cutting slices to order, and then head over to the nearby Choctaw Indian casinos which rivaled Las Vegas.

We left Vicksburg and had Philadelphia in our sights. 

Willam's Brothers General Store

Over hill and dale we drove and as we entered Philadephia, and immediately saw a sign for the William's Brother store. We dismissed this as it was just a little place and in no way would rival even the smallest Wal*Mart. We kept driving, putting a new address into the GPS, but when we arrived at that location there wasn't a store anywhere in sight.

So back to that first sighting we went.

The store does have a full parking lot, so we pulled into a church lot a few hundred yard away, put the dogs in their air-conditioned comfort in the trailer, and trekked through the heat to the store.

The Bacon Boys

It definitely didn't compared to a Wal*Mart, heck it was just about the same size of Weber's Grocery & Hardware in my hometown of Tripp, South Dakota. But there were three, not two, guys near the front door cutting bacon slices to order. I had to wait in line to get my custom order.

We picked up a few more items that we needed, and at the check-out stand asked about nearby camping. I guess not many people camp around here because no one knew the name of any campground in the area, so they grabbed a phonebook (you remember what those were, right?) and looked for the place they knew was "just down the road a piece".

One of the Choctaw Casinos

We called them but they were filled up. It seems that there was going to be a big Choctaw Indian festival pow-wow starting and all the available spaces anywhere in the area would be filled up. It was then suggested we could drive to the casinos and camp in their parking lot.

We did, and yes the casinos were impressive, but Marianne wisely decided that this would be no place to camp. So we decided to turn around and head to Meridian.

Our normal modus operandi is to start driving to our destination and make reservations via computer or cell phone on the way. Since we found three campgrounds in the Meridian area, we thought that this would be no problem.

Not.

We called the first campground and we’re amazed to learn that on a Tuesday they were full! They recommended the second campground and when we called them, they too were full. I had to know what was up. Was it a festival? Sporting event? Fishing derby? Nope. It was just a increase in jobs in the area and many people were living in these campgrounds.

Our last hope was the KOA about 15 miles west of town.

I called them and was elated to find out that they had just one spot left. Great, I said. Wait, they said.

I turns out that they had had a fair amount of rain in the past couple of hours and the site was in the mud. I said I could handle that. Well, they said, you should know that two previous campers looked at and rejected the site because of the mud.

I’m brave; I said I’d give it a try. Okay, I’m a fool.

We found the KOA a couple of miles off of the Interstate in its own little holler, a totally different atmosphere than we’ve ever seen for a KOA. Just looking at the place, I should have turned around. But remember I said I’m a fool.

In my estimation this was probably the worst KOA in their entire system. The first impression was a barnyard. We were greeted with a couple washing a ton of mud off of their pick-up truck with a pressure washer and a woman approached them with the largest décolletage (look it up) I’ve ever seen in a campground or any place for that matter. Whoa!

Registering at the office, we were once again reminded that two other campers had rejected this site, and I once again foolishly replied “no problem”. We were given a one hour time limit to check the site out.

We drove through the muddy campground which had no paved roads anywhere, and arrived at the infamous site. Yup, it was a mud hole, but hey, I have a big four-wheel drive truck and I was confident.

We pulled into the site and the left side of the trailer dropped six inches into the mucky red mud. I looked at the truck and it had about 25 pounds of this red stuff on each of the four mud flaps. And the tires were no longer black, but rather an orange/red. More yuck.

The trailer was tilting, no make that listing to port (that’s left to you landlubbers!). There was no way that could walk through this stuff and then the dogs, too, and get into the trailer without bringing in a copious amount of this yuck.

And I could have used my leveling blocks to fix the list, but my fear was that once I put those blocks into place, I would never ever get them out of the muck again.  

The only redeeming quality of this site was the fact that the woman with the décolletage (you’ve looked it up, right?) would be my neighbor. She and her man were in a brand spanking new Montana Big Sky fifth wheel. They weren’t tourists here, but this was their new home.

Fortunately I had told Marianne before we pulled in, that if I didn’t like the site, she would not have any say if I elected to pull out again.

And I used my trump card and elected to put the truck in four-wheel drive low, and prayed to the gods that I could pull my Monte out of its yucky mucky. Four hundred horsepower and eight hundred foot pounds of torque easily did their job (thank you gods!). At the office we received our refund.

Somehow trying to find available camping in this part of Mississippi is not easy. Who knew? Live and learn.

Since we were only 125 miles from Montgomery, I called the same campground we had stayed in three years earlier, The Woods, and they had plenty of room. I put The Woods into my GPS and off we went.

During our misadventure at the KOA we did not let our dogs out, since I feared they would 1) disappear into a mud hole or 2) become filthy orange/red. So they didn’t get a chance to do their “business.”

Both of our dogs reside on huge soft plush pillows on the back seat of our F-250. They eagerly get into the truck, and by the time we are at the gates of whichever campground we’ve left, they are in sleep mode. And they can both stay down six hours straight, although we usually don’t drive that long on one stretch. But we hadn’t given them a break since we had left Vicksburg.

Coco’s latest trick is to stir from her plush throne put her front paws on my the back of my seat, and then take her paw and start pawing on my shoulder as if to say, “Hey dad, you gotta stop, I need to do my business.” And yes, I do get the hint.

Heading toward the Montgomery countryside I tried to find a restaurant to pull over and kill two birds with one stone. We eat, they…well you know…

But it turns out that they roll up the sidewalks in this part of Alabama as the sun starts setting. Hang on, Coco, I’m looking out for you.

We finally found a place we could easily pull over, but as soon as we did, the skies opened up and it started pouring! Marianne bravely took the dogs on a quick walk while I started the generator in the trailer and put out our main slide out so we could get the air-conditioner going.

I was successful but Marianne ran into a bit of a problem.

The dogs found a red ant mound on the side of the road. Those ants weren’t too excited about being discovered in the rain, since they were already in a panic mode. Fortunately Marianne knew what those ants can do to man and beast so she immediately jerked Molly and Coco away. No damage! Whew.

After a quick dinner with the pitter-patter of the rain on the trailer, and the swoosh of trucks rushing by just feet from us, we closed up shop, returned to our positions in the truck, and continued on to Montgomery.

Marianne’s brother Peter was driving in from Jacksonville, Florida, and we had been continually in touch asking each other where we were in relationship to Montgomery. They were surprised to learn that we weren’t spending a night in Meridian, and then excited to learn that we would probably arrive simultaneously at Marianne’s mom’s home.

We arrived at The Woods after the desk had closed, but they had kindly left us a manila envelope with our packet. Unfortunately they had assigned us one site on the paperwork and drawn the track to another site. We went to the first site, then realized the difference, and drove to the other site to discover it was occupied, so back we went to the first site, and finally set-up camp.

About 9:30pm we headed to mom’s home, but we first had to stop at Krystal Burger, a Montgomery tradition for me. I picked up a dozen of their mini-cheeseburgers, and was warmly welcomed with my late night snack.

The reunion begins.