After a week of Malcolm being out of town on a business trip and Val plodding around the house with her broken foot, we’re both back together and out in the trailer this evening. We hauled a whole back seat full of stuff to the trailer in the afternoon and another full back seat worth of groceries this evening.

It seems hard to believe our first full paid month in the campground has already passed. Val stopped by the office last Friday and paid us up for a couple weeks. The big yearly event at Fort Toulouse park is Frontier Days and it happens in a little over two weeks from now. Long term campground residents are asked to help volunteer during that week.

Val is going to do the best she can given her condition (though she should be out of the full cast by then and able to get around better). Malcolm is going to help out as he can, mostly on the weekend at the end of the week (which is busiest anyway). In exchange for helping out, we get a free week at the campground. Not a bad deal.

There were a couple of pretty good thunderstorms while we were away from the campground last week. One lightning strike hit very near the park office and another supposedly close to the campground. We nervously checked that everything seemed to work in the trailer when we opened it back up this afternoon. So far haven’t found anything not working.

I ordered a wired in 50 amp Progressive Industries surge protector for the trailer from Camping World the end of last week so it should be here in a week or so. Until then, hopefully no more storms. Weather forecast is showing all sunny days and clear nights for the next week or so.

We also have a couple of trips planned in the next couple of months. First, the weekend before Thanksgiving, we’re going to head up to Oak Mountain State Park for the weekend and visit a few friends up there. Might stop by Camping World and browse the store, as well. From there, on Sunday, we’re heading down to Alabama’s gulf coast for the rest of the week. We’re planning on staying at Gulf State Park. Our son is probably going to drive down on Thanksgiving day and we’ll have our holiday meal at the Cracker Barrel in Foley.

The other big trip is that we have an appointment for December 3 to get the transmission in our F350 professionally rebuilt at Brian’s Truck Shop in Lead Hill, Arkansas. While we haven’t had any transmission problems in the truck, it does have 178,000 miles on what we assume is the original transmission. Brian advertises that his rebuilds are warrantied for two years, but the informal warranty is that “you aren’t going to break it”.

We’ll feel a lot better about the truck after we have that done. With some of the other work we’ve had done on it this summer and a few other things we’re doing with it this fall, it’ll be a really reliable tow rig. Not bad for an 11 year old truck.