Current Location: Tom Sawyer’s Mississippi River RV Park, West Memphis, Arkansas

Miles Traveled: 354

Our first day on the road went off pretty uneventful. After a group of campers at Ft. Toulouse offering their assistance in getting us hooked up (didn’t really need it, but let them “help”, nonetheless), we drove to the dump station and cleaned and emptied the tanks really well. Then it was off and up the road.

Dumping at Ft. Toulouse.

We traveled up I-65 from Montgomery to Birmingham. On the way, we stopped at a Love’s Truck Stop in Clanton to weigh the whole rig, since this is the first time we’ve been on the road with it fully loaded to live in. With a 1/2 tank of fuel, the water and holding tanks empty and Val sitting in the truck (I was standing outside), the total was 22,780 lb. With myself in the truck, we’re right at 23,000 lb., about where I was expecting to be.

Loaded, rolling weight.

We also stopped at Camping World to look for a couple of items we didn’t want to have to wait on ordering – an outside rug and a new Woodalls campground book. We also signed up for a Passport America card. Also, they were running a special that I could add a year onto my Good Sam membership for $20 and get a free night camping (up to $25). I’ve already got a copy of today’s receipt in an envelope with the coupon to send off in the mail (they reimburse you).

We stopped at another Love’s Truck Stop to eat lunch at McDonalds since we hadn’t really organized anything to eat along the way. We’ll start doing that more to save a few bucks.

The truck ran fine and pulled all the hills it was asked to pull, if not a little slower than the rest of the traffic. Still averaging about 9.3 – 9.4 mpg.

We ended up at Tom Sawyer Mississippi River RV Park, right on the river in West Memphis, Arkansas. We’ll be here two nights. We plan on attending church in Memphis on Sunday morning at Independent Presbyterian Church, where the pastor from our current church in Alabama came from. We’ll pack up and move on after lunch. Until then, we plan on taking our extra day tomorrow and do some sight-seeing in Memphis.

I’ll close with a picture of our site as we arrived. The Mississippi River is in the background.

Camped along the Mississippi.