Current Location: Fort Toulouse Campground, Wetumpka, Alabama

New Year’s Day was pretty low key. We all went to the mall for the children to play in the play area. We (Malcolm, Val and David) went to the food court to get lunch. Shortly thereafter, the rest of the family appeared and were heading home since Elizabeth wasn’t feeling well. She ended up coming down with a fever and felt cruddy the rest of our visit. The rest of New Year’s Day was pretty low key. Elizabeth rested while the rest of us took care of grandchildren.

On Thursday, Cole headed back to work for the day. Nana and Pa took the grandbabies out to McDonalds for lunch and had a great time. Though we sat in the play place area, there were too many bigger (and bossier) children there for Violet to feel comfortable playing, so we skipped that part of the visit.

Nana and the girls at lunch

The rest of Thursday was pretty quiet. We entertained the girls while Mom rested. Cole came home after work and fixed us dinner. We just visited the rest of the evening until the girls headed to bed. After that, Cole took us to the airport around 10:00 PM. We had an 11:55 PM (Pacific time) flight to Atlanta from Seattle.

This morning, we arrived in Atlanta around 8:00 AM Eastern time. We were tired, but glad to be on the ground. We collected our luggage and caught the shuttle bus back to the Marriot Hotel where we had parked the truck. The temperature in Atlanta was frigid. It apparently had rained on Thursday as well. Malcolm found that the truck doors were frozen shut. Fortunately, the driver’s door opened fine. We loaded up the truck and headed towards home.

A balmy 22 degrees in Atlanta (we drove the old truck to Atlanta and left the new one at the campground).

Once home, we dropped David off and headed to the trailer. We kicked the heat back up to 72 (we left it at 50 while we were gone, to keep the pipes from freezing), turned on the fireplace and space heater, and decided to take a couple hour nap until about 1:00.

We headed to the house to drop the old truck off and pick up stuff from the house. Val decided to stop by the post office to pick up our accumulated mail after they indicated they could do that and keep the mail hold in place for a couple more weeks. It was a good thing she checked, as one of the pieces of mail we received was a jury duty summons for Val, for the week we are supposed to be in Tampa for the RV show. Val called the number and left a message to see if she can get out of serving. We never got a call back today, but will try again Monday (while we are at Disney).

We did grocery shopping and brought back our freezer items from the house to put back in the defrosted refrigerator at the trailer (we turned it on and closed it when we first arrived in the morning). We bought frozen entrees from the store and heated them up for dinner.

The campground folks were going around and covering the water spigots since they’re expecting very cold weather Monday and Tuesday evenings (in the teens). We had left our water unhooked while we were away and didn’t get a chance to put more in our tank before they covered the spigot. We figure we have enough for now to flush the toilet, so we’ll be good. (Very worst case, we’re close to the bathhouse).

Tomorrow morning, we’ll pack up and head towards Florida. We’re not due at Disney until Sunday, so we’ll probably drive a good portion of the way and pick a place to overnight, then drive on to Disney mid-day on Sunday. David is going to follow along in his car so he can drive back for Air Force stuff next weekend.