Current Location: Fort Toulouse Campground, Wetumpka, Alabama

We’ve been parked so that Malcolm could work for 10 weeks straight and today we finally hit the road for a four week tour. This is Trip 2 this year, or Trip 12 according to the trip pages that Malcolm has set up. We were up early this morning and our preparations the day before paid off as it was raining pretty well. Having actual water-proof rain coats this time helped tremendously as well. We were hooked up and ready to roll pretty quickly.

The trip to Alabama was pretty uneventful. It rained hard most of the way through Tennessee but had let up pretty well by the time we hit the Alabama border. We stopped at the Alabama welcome center rest area for a break, using the facilities in the trailer instead of hiking to the facilities there since it was still pretty wet and miserable.

We stopped between Birmingham and Wetumpka at the Clanton rest area and had lunch in the truck. We let Callie out for a bit and she became fascinated by the activity behind us in the picnic table area. The sun was peeking through the clouds and the rain had stopped by the time we stopped for lunch.

Callie checking out the activity at the rest area

We arrived at Fort Toulouse around 2:00 and set up the trailer. There are quite a few RVs here, not surprisingly. Most of our favorite spots were taken and the ground is well-saturated here from several inches of rain the last couple days. A few of the sites are still a little flooded.

Set up on Site 19

Our site was not flooded, but the ground on both sides is very soft. We put our rug out in front of the steps and Malcolm put out a few plastic levelers to use as stepping stones on the soft ground.

Stepping Stones

After getting set up, we stopped by the office to pay for our 3-day stay. We are leaving the day that rates go up (from $15 to $18 as the normal RV rate). It is still a bargain, in our opinion. After paying at the office, we stopped by Murphy Oil and filled the truck with $120 worth of diesel (Nashville to Wetumpka can be done on a little less than a tank of fuel if the wind is not bad).

We stopped by the storage unit and put one thing away from the trailer and picked up a couple boxes of pictures to start scanning. We also found Malcolm’s baby book, as he needed to find out which hospital he was born in so he can order a birth certificate. We also grabbed a couple boxes of t-shirts that we are going to ship off to get made into quilts or lap robes.

After the storage unit, we headed into Montgomery and picked up some items we needed at Costco, looked in a couple stores for something we’re looking for but didn’t find, ate dinner at Red Robin, stopped by the grocery to get some eggs, then headed back to the trailer. Malcolm has been scanning pictures all evening over at our new desk, which has been handy.