RVing With a Purpose

Thursday, August 9, 2018

No barges again today. But we did get the storms. It sounded like lightning struck somewhere close by this afternoon. The campground lost power for a few minutes twice after close strikes. You couldn’t see across the river or the dam it was raining so hard. On the plus side, the temperature dropped to 72 for a short while. Incredibly cool for August in Alabama. It’s actually quite nice out this evening and we are sitting out on our deck looking over the river working on this blog entry. Hopefully our ThermaCell will keep the mosquitoes at bay.

We were able to get both our morning and afternoon walks in today. We have been blessed the last several weeks to be able get more exercise and we can both tell we are feeling and sleeping better than we were for a while. Otherwise, we did some more estate work, and paid bills for Helen and Jean. We also ate breakfast and our late lunch (grilled again) on our patio. We also met some folks that came in last night and visited with them a while, of course sharing the NOMADS story.  Sure enjoying Deerlick Creek COE campground. Enjoying it so much we decided to extend our stay. We will go back to Blount County this weekend but it’s not much further from the campground than Mama Ruby’s house and it’s so nice here.

Wednesday, August 8, 2018

Another relaxing day. We had clouds off and on and at one point were surrounded by rain but it never rained at Deerlick Creek. The temperature did drop by about 10 degrees which made for much nicer walking tonight.

After our morning walk we again cooked breakfast and ate outside. Love eating outside at quiet campsites like this. We sat outside waiting to see if the lock was back in service but never saw any barges passing today. There was construction noise. We haven’t found anything online about a delay but appears the river is not back open. There is usually a lot of barge traffic and it hurts businesses when the river is shut down so hopefully it will reopen soon. We both took naps out on our deck today.

We have seen this young deer every day since we have arrived but today finally got a picture. This area of north Alabama has lots of deer, wild turkey, coyotes and an occasional bear, wild hog, or bobcat. All our neighbors pulled out today so we are the only ones in the river side loop tonight. We might just have to extend our stay.

Tuesday, August 7, 2018

By 10:00 it was 96 with heat index of 100. That is just too hot. However, about that time we started having some clouds come and go. We had thunder and threats of rain most of the rest of the day but never got a drop. We did have some nice light breezes and over about an hour we went from 96 to 88. Much better.

We got a nice walk in this morning before it got too hot. We walked a couple of the trails as well as the roadway in and out of the park, a little over three miles, some nice wooded trails. We also stopped and visited with the work camper in the gate house. He and is girl friend started work here yesterday and we were one of the first RVs they checked in. A nice visit. We might like to work camp here sometime. After a wonderful breakfast of cinnamon raisin brioche french toast at our picnic table we enjoyed reading and relaxing and watching the light boat traffic. We were expecting to watch the barges but never saw any. Then we realized there were working on the locks. From reading the news stories online we found that Holt lock was closed in July for replacement of the gates and is scheduled to reopen tomorrow. That would explain the lack of traffic. There is a neat YouTube video on the replacement of the gates. If it reopens tomorrow we expect lots of backed up barge traffic. It will be interesting to watch tomorrow.  As the temps rose we retreated to the comfort of Fred except for grilling a late lunch. We visited with our next door neighbor who left late today and did another hike just before dark. That was our day. A wonderful return to a day in the campground. Good food. Good hiking.

Monday, August 6, 2018

Today was really hot and humid with a high of 97 and triple digit heat index. Yuck!! Thankfully we did a fairly early walk this morning because tonight we didn’t walk but about 15 minutes.

We had some more errands to run today and a little laundry. Then we packed Fred up and moved a whopping 18 miles to Deerlick Creek Corp of Engineers campground. We have a wonderfully shaded, waterfront site on the Warrior River. This is actually just a few miles by water and one lock and dam to our cabin at Yellow Creek. We always love being on the water. We can watch the boats and barges go up and down the river. COE parks are some of our favorites for quiet restful times. We are only about 30 minutes from Mama Ruby’s house if we need to get back into town to handle some business but we are sort of tired of driveway camping. We plan to stay the rest of the week and just may not leave the park at all. Reading and hiking and resting are on our agenda.