Author: rvingwithapurpose

Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Wow. We stayed above freezing last night. The first night in forever, it seems. Time to celebrate! This has been such an abnormally long cold spell. The sun came out after lunch but with the wind, the 43 degrees still didn’t feel very warm. We thought tonight was going to be okay too, but they revised forecast and are now predicting 26 again tonight. Doesn’t make us happy.

This morning we went to the Nature Center for a presentation on alligators. It was very well done. They have two little alligators, about 12 inches long, that they used for presentations. They came from Alligator Alley, a nature preserve in Gulf Shores and are on loan for educational purposes. We learned that the gators have 80 teeth when they are born – 40 uppers and 40 lowers. These gators, still being only 4 months old, have tiny needle like teeth. While they may not be able to do the damage of the larger gators, we were told that a bite even at this young age is very painful and once they bite they will not let go. You have to get something like a pencil the pry the jaws open. The presenter held the little one but let us touch them, feel the tail and the back. When these little guys are about one year old they have to go back to the preserve because they become too dangerous to keep at the Center. Mama gators lay lots of eggs each year but probably only one baby will live to reach sexual maturity at 6 years old. They stay with mama until age three. So Mama will have babies, one, and two year olds all at the same time and then kick the three year olds that have survived, out, to go find their own territory. Of course, right now due to the cold weather, there are no gators out in the open in the bogs and canals. They don’t hibernate, but sort of burrow up in the mud to stay warm. We have fairly often seen gators in bogs/marshy areas when we have been here in warm weather. We also got to see the barred owl, hawk and great horned owl again while at the nature center.

Later in the day we went back to the outlets for a little more shopping. We did find a few items we decided to bring home. Then we stopped at the Original Oyster House for dinner. We always enjoy eating there, looking out over the water, and have never been served a bad meal.

Late this afternoon, Kelly, the park naturalist who led our First Day Hike, stopped by for a visit. We invited her to come see some of our photos of eagles from Alaska. We really enjoyed her visit. Nice lady. She and her husband, who we also met Monday, do a lot of wild life photography. They hope to go to Alaska some day, after the kids are grown. Of course we would love to go back some day. Come back tomorrow to see what we did. We don’t know what it will be. We are flexible.

Tuesday, January 2, 2018

It was a really cold morning. The official low was 19 in Gulf Shores. Our thermometer didn’t go below 23, but that was cold enough. We have been pleasantly surprised at how comfortable we have been living in FRED in these cold temperatures. FRED 2 has better insulation than FRED 1 had and the heat pumps and furnaces have worked great. We have not cleared the antifreeze from the lines yet and have just been using bottled water to flush the toilet and wash dishes etc. We have used the bath houses here at the park as well. The sun was out today but it was after lunch before we got above freezing. Our high was 40. However, they keep changing their minds on the low for the rest of the week so we will wait until tomorrow to decide about unwinterizing. We have waited this long we sure wouldn’t want to do it one day too soon.

While it was 40, we decided to do a little walking around the park. They have made a lot of improvements since were were here last in 2013. We are told most of the improvements have been funded by the BP settlement money. There are new boardwalks everywhere. They are finally rebuilding the old convention center and the bike trails have been greatly improved. None of the projects have been completed but some of the trails and boardwalks are open. Too bad it’s been too cold to ride bikes. We walked out one of the board walks for sunset this afternoon.

The park has begun its winter activities this week. Tonight there was a jam session at the activities building. We decided to go check it out. We know some of our NOMADS friends would have really enjoyed playing with these guys. There were 10 musicians, most of whom appeared to know each other and had been at the park for the winter in previous years. They had 10 guitars, a mandolin, a hammer dulcimer and a bowed psaltery. The music was mostly older songs like “Cajun Moon”, “Wabash Cannonball” and “Margaritaville”. The owner of the hammer dulcimer played a beautiful rendition of “Carol of the Bells”. There was a total of about 30 people in attendance. It was fun and some of the musicians were very good. We haven’t been able to do some of the things we had hoped to do when we planned this little time at the beach before starting our winter projects, but we are having some nice time to just rest, read and relax. Flexibility has been our word for 2018 so far. We will see what tomorrow brings.

Monday, January 1, 2018

We didn’t see the new year arrive, but evidently there were some others making an early night of it too. Shortly after we were snug in our warm bed around 10:00 there was a nice little volley of fireworks over on the beach that we could easily enjoy out our bedroom window. It was enough for us.

It was cold this morning. Really cold for Gulf Shores. The rangers here at the state park had asked everyone to please disconnect from the water system and leave the water dripping last night. Not a problem. We weren’t planning to leave our hose out in 26 degree weather. It was really surprising to us the number of people who seemed totally surprised to learn the weather was going to get really cold. Evidently some didn’t believe it because there were a number of broken pipes today. We felt sorry for the guys having to be out in the cold repairing them. We had this cool looking stalagmite icicle this morning at our dripping faucet.

We had a really pretty sunrise this morning. The sun was shining brightly and it looked so deceptively nice outside when in reality it was cold and windy. Around 10:00, the people who were in our site for the next four days pulled out of the park and we moved right down the road to site 31, from 16. This was the shortest driving day we have ever done. Less than a tenth of a mile. Wow, we were exhausted from all that driving. Anyway, we got settled into our new site and relaxed the rest of the morning.

The Alabama state parks have a program named “First Day Hike”. The first day of the new year, a ranger from each participating park leads a hike of their park. It is usually a pretty easy hike that highlights a feature of the park. We try to go to different parks to do the hike each year. The hike here at Gulf State Park this year was on Eagle Loop Trail that passes within viewing distance of an eagle nest. There is a pair of eagles on the nest so we of course wanted to make the hike. We wondered if it would be canceled due to the weather because others across the state were canceled, but not here. We put on multiple layers of clothing and went to the trail head. There was actually about 30 hardy souls at the trail head at 2:00. The park staff had a red tail hawk, a great horned owl and a barred owl for us to see and photograph while we waited for everyone to arrive. Really beautiful birds. The hawk is new to the park – less than 2 weeks at the nature center – and appears very curious when in reality his eyes aren’t focusing due to damage from West Nile virus. His depth perception is about 2 inches off when they try to feed him. He sadly will not be able to be released back into the wild. The staff had also built us a fire which we hated to leave when it was time to hike. But hike we did. Kelly, the park naturalist, lead the hike and shared information on various plants in the park as we walked. By law you can not be closer than 333 feet to an eagle nest or bother them in any way. Our first view of the nest we were quite a distance away but later in the hike we were closer and could see the white head of an eagle hunkered down in the nest. Beautiful bird. We also walked out to lake Shelby, the feeding ground of the eagles and learned more about the birds in the area and critters in and around the lake. We were told that the female eagle is on the nest about 80 percent of the time and the male relieves her for about 20 percent of the time. After the eggs are hatched, they share the work of feeding the little ones more equally. It was a good first day hike with a surprisingly large group given a temperature of 36 and wind chill in the teens.

After returning to FRED, it took us a while to feel warm again so we stayed in the rest of the day. It’s nice just looking out the windows at the water. Hope you had a safe and happy New Year’s Day.

December 31, 2017

The last day of the year began with rain. It started raining sometime during the night and rained intermittently and never very heavy until around lunch. So, it was another gray day. The sun didn’t even think about showing itself today. It wasn’t as cold as predicted either. Our low was only about 40, so no problem with staying nice and warm. The generator didn’t cut on at all last night. It was about to cut on this morning when Anne gave it a little enticement by cutting on the tea kettle. We love our automatic start on the generator.

We had a sort of slow start to the day partially due to the rain and partially due to Camping World not opening until 11:00. We were only about 2.5 hours from there. Between the showers Max went across the street to grab us some breakfast. When we did get back on the interstate it was a wet drive. We kept seeing these South Carolina cars with all sorts of orange flags and banners and tiger tails hanging out of the trunk. Wonder where they were going. Unfortunately for one of them who sped past us, Alabama law enforcement was giving them an unwanted welcome to our state a short way down the highway. Oh well, Mississippi may be doing the same to some Alabama fans. We were able to live stream the Lester Memorial UMC worship service while we were driving. In case you were wondering, Anne watched and Max just listened. Love our church and our pastor.

Yea, Camping World, not usually our favorite place. True to his word, Eric was there when we arrived and filled our propane tank. While we were at CW, they sold their last two bottles of RV antifreeze and had several more people come it hoping to purchase the same. We travel with our antifreeze this time of year. The low tonight here is 27 which doesn’t bother us, but tomorrow is predicted 23 in Gulf Shores so we will be using the propane furnace to keep the sewer bay and holding tanks from freezing tomorrow night. Our rear furnace is vented to blow warm air on the tanks and into the sewer bay. All should be good.

After CW, it was just a few miles on down to Foley to the Tanger Outlets. There is one store there where we are usually able to get much better deals on Merrill shoes/boots than any where else. We both found some boots on close out that were about half price. We may go back to check out the Eddie Bauer store. Today we were able to snag a last minute site at the state park so we headed on to Gulf Shores to check in. Our original reservation began on January 1 and we were planning to stay in Foley for the night but with the cold we decided we would really prefer to just go ahead and get in the park. Now we have all the 50amp power we want to power our fire place and heat pumps.

For dinner we went to Mikee’s Seafood, a well known restaurant in Gulf Shores and had some steamed Royal Red shrimp. Oh my, they were so good! We had been wanting some good seafood. Hope we can satisfy that craving several more times over the next few weeks.

Some of you have been praying for our second cousin Joshua for some time. He, at 13 years old, has a very rare brain and spinal cancer. He has done well the past couple of months. The family had a very good Christmas. However, at 12:30 this morning he was flown from Huntsville, his home, to Children’s Hospital in Birmingham,. They are still trying to determine if the current problems are related to disease progression or something else. Please be in prayer for the entire family.