Our Last Week at Gulf State Park

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

Our last week in Gulf State Park was mostly a beautiful week.  The first few days you could not have asked for better weather.  We spent our time on long hikes, walks on the beach, beautiful sunrises and sunsets, and great bike rides.  Of course, we visited the eagles again and finally caught another “shift change” by the parents.  We are pretty sure that we have eaglets in the nest because we saw one of the parents bring in a fish and watched what appeared to be feeding of the little ones even though the eaglets are still so small we could not see them above the rim of the nest.  We also made our “required” visit to Foley.  Anne usually makes that visit early in our time at Gulf Shores but she made sure to visit the outlets before we left.  Of course, since we found a new to us shop – Stacey’s Olde Tyme Soda Fountain – while in old town Foley, we had to give it a try.  They make their own waffle cones – so very good.  Don’t think it will be our last visit.  We also had some surprises toward the end of the week.   First, the weather got cold again.  So, we began our time at the park back in December with record low temperatures and then ended our stay again with below freezing temps (not what we were expecting when we scheduled our little vacation.) 

We had an exciting surprise in the form of a message from Anne’s cousin Tom, telling us he was just down the street from us.  He and wife Tammy were at his mother-in-law’s condo.  They live in Indiana, so we don’t get in-person visits very often although we try to have a family zoom meeting about once a month.  We had a great lunch together on Friday before we had to return to Fred to prepare for our Saturday travel day.  It was such a treat to visit with Tom and Tammy and meet Tammy’s sweet mom.  It was a great ending to our Gulf Shores visit.

We pulled out of Gulf State Park Saturday morning at 6:30 since we had a long drive day to Webster, Florida.  Oak Alley RV Resort will be our home for about 17 days.  Wouldn’t you know it.  When we arrived about 5:30 Saturday evening, we were asked to leave the water faucet dripping and use our tank water for the next two nights as the prediction was for low temperatures of 31 degrees.  We are in central FL, not far from Tampa.  We are not supposed to have freezing temperatures in Florida!  Hope our RVing friends are having better luck finding appropriate temperatures this winter.  Oh, well.  The forecast for the week is looking good so we will try not to complain.  We will get some pictures and tell you more about Oak Alley next week, but our initial impression is really good.

Praying you all stay safe, warm and healthy.  Love you all.