Current Location: Fort Toulouse Campground, Wetumpka, Alabama

On New Years Day, we all piled in the car and headed down to the YMCA. They were giving out free t-shirts (nice ones at that) for the first 1,000 people to show up. We all got t-shirts (even us, though we were visitors). The girls, Cole and Elizabeth went swimming while we went walking on the track.

We generally just relaxed on Sunday and Monday. On Monday afternoon, Cole came down with a cold. The rest of us went out to dinner at Famous Dave’s Bar-B-Que.

On Tuesday morning, Cole was up early and headed to work. Violet started back to school, too. We walked out to her bus stop with her, though we didn’t have to walk too far – her bus picks her up at her driveway.

Violet heading off to school.

With Violet off to school, Scarlet wanted to get Happy Donuts for breakfast, so we headed down to Puyallup for a little breakfast treat. We bought an extra for Violet and brought it home so she could have it the next day.

Donut breakfast.

Violet asked if we would pick her up from school instead of her riding the bus, so we all headed over to wait on her to get out of class.

We told the girls goodbye on Tuesday evening since Cole was going to take us to the airport on Wednesday morning on his way to work. It meant we would be at the airport a couple hours early, but we didn’t mind. As it turns out, he felt terrible the next morning and decided to stay in and get over his cold. Elizabeth ended up running us to the airport, which meant we could leave a little later and tell the girls goodbye again in the morning.

We had a mid-morning flight from Seattle to Atlanta, arriving around 5:30 PM Atlanta time. We took the shuttle back to the Holiday Inn that we stayed in on the way out since our car was parked there. Rather than drive back to Alabama really late (close to 3 hour drive), we stayed in the Holiday Inn again. We ate dinner in the restaurant and relaxed in the room, since Val was coming down with a cold, as well.

On Thursday morning, we had breakfast in the hotel (included in the room price), packed up our stuff into the car and drove back to Montgomery. Once we got into town, we went ahead and stopped by Costco for a couple items, filled up the car with gas there, stopped by Target for a couple items and Whole Foods for some spices. After lunch at San Marcos in Montgomery, we stopped by Winn Dixie to get milk and juice then on back to the trailer to unload.

Once we got everything out of the car, Malcolm checked on our RV toilet. It had been backed up before we left, so we had poured some RidX down the toilet to see if it would eat up the backup while we were in Washington. No luck there. Malcolm headed over to Lowe’s and bought a toilet snake and got the clog cleared with that and the garden hose. He emptied the black tank and flushed it really well.

Apparently while we were away, the Asian Ladybugs were swarming and looking for a place to hide for the cold weather. When Malcolm opened the storage door on the sewer tote, he found a couple dozen ladybugs hiding in the hinge. So far, we have only found one inside, so we’re hoping that the trailer was sealed up well enough to keep them out for the most part. We’ll find out when we go to bring in slides to move next week.

Ladybug stowaways

Today was a cold and rainy day. Malcolm spent most of the day working. Val packed up all the Christmas stuff and we made a pile of things to take to our storage unit. We took our empty suitcases over to storage and picked up our Christmas storage boxes and brought them back. We made a second trip a little later and put away the Christmas items and brought out the winter/spring stuff.

Important winter/spring decorations.

After the two trips to the storage unit, we were pretty much set for the next couple months. We also brought back our t-shirt collection to sort through for our 2016 t-shirt quilt. We also filled up an empty propane tank in preparation for the cold weather then next few nights.

With freezing rain and sleet forecast for after sunset this evening, Malcolm ran out one final time to pick up a couple items we needed for dinner. After dinner, we curled up in front of the fireplace and kept warm with hot toddies. Val went to bed early to work on shaking off her cold.

Malcolm made reservations for us in Panama City next week. We’ll leave on Monday for there and will be in various places in Florida through at least mid-February. This year we have solid reservations in Florida, so no questionable campgrounds or one-night stays. We have two weeks at Walt Disney World, and one week each at two separate Florida State Park campgrounds. We’ll wander our way back to this area late in February.