Current Location: Pineglen RV Park, Panama City Beach, Florida

Wednesday, Malcolm left for work a little late so he could fill one more LP tank and let the office at the KOA know that we were leaving a couple days early. They gave us a credit for the two days. Malcolm left work a little early to take the rental car back and got a ride home from the rental agency.

Once back at the trailer, Malcolm emptied all the gray and black tanks and disconnected the water hose. He put everything else outside away, leaving only the electric cord to unhook in the morning. We ate dinner then headed out to Kroger to do the rest of our Christmas shopping – gift cards.

Gift cards aplenty

Kroger started offering 4X fuel points on gift cards on Wednesday, so we took advantage of it and purchased $700 worth of gift cards (2800 fuel points) along with a few groceries. We filled up the truck and used 500 of the fuel points to get 50 cents a gallon off our fuel (making diesel $2.99 a gallon).

This morning, we were up before dawn and were rolling out of Nashville at 6:00 am. We pretty much beat the majority of Nashville’s rush hour traffic. Our drive to Panama City Beach was 485 miles. We also crossed the 40,000 total traveled miles threshold about halfway into today’s trip. We arrived a little before 4:00 and got set up here at Pineglen, then called David to tell him to come on out.

All set up.

David came out to the trailer and we all had potato soup for dinner, then headed to Publix to get Thanksgiving dinner groceries. On the way back to the campground, we stopped by the Tom Thumb gas station (owned by Kroger) and Malcolm tried to use our Kroger card at the pump to get a discount, but it wouldn’t work. They said to just fill up, then come in and they’d scan the card and take payment at the register.

When Malcolm got back inside, their credit card processing had quit working. Fortunately, Malcolm had enough cash and paid for the fuel. They couldn’t scan the Kroger card (related to the credit card processing being out), so they gave Malcollm $25 back in cash, representing a dollar a gallon discount (what he was going to use if everything worked). The upside is that we didn’t use any fuel points.

After grocery shopping, David headed back to the base. It’s about 40 minutes away. We stayed here at Pineglen before and liked it, though it isn’t convenient to the base. The campgrounds near the base all had marginal to bad reviews and David verified he had physically seen at least one of them and wasn’t impressed at all. He tried to get us into the Fam Camp on base, but it is booked during the Thanksgiving holiday.

Today’s license plate count – 25 of 51 plates.

License Plates