The First and Second Days on the Road

Hello Everyone,

What an interesting day, Friday the 12^th of August!! We left Cumming, GA at 9:00 AM. Dad had to stop by one of his customers in Cherokee County because they were having computer issues.  It took him three hours to resolve that problem, while he was there the 6 of us went to a park about 5 minutes away. Unfortunately during this delay, we missed our meeting with my dad’s cousin, Ken Sheckler. We were going to meet him at 10:00 in Birmingham Alabama, but that didn’t work out!  We had a nice lunch of egg and tuna salad at the park and Josh and I threw the Frisbee while the others rode their bikes. At about 1:30 we got a call from dad saying he was almost done at work and we could come pick him up.  We left there and have been driving ever since.  At 5:00 (Eastern Time Zone) we crossed into Alabama.  We were going to stay Tupelo, Mississippi at the Natchez Trace RV Park last night. We weren’t going to be able to make the 10 hour drive to Hot Springs, Arkansas, so we would head there tomorrow (mind you that this is Friday). What an evening! We were at the Piggly Wiggly parking lot and tried to slide out the RV to get to our dinner.  We could not get it to slide out.  So we called Mr. Eddie Terry who loaned us the RV and he offered to bring us a new RV in the morning.  After much prayer and consideration we decided we would have Mr. Terry bring the new rig.  We found a campground at a state park on the map and proceeded to head there.  When we got there, unfortunately, the gate was padlocked. We had pulled into the small road leading to the gate and we couldn’t turn around or back up because we were pulling the van. We were in a pickle, so Josh and Dad ran into the park to see if they could find someone to help us. They were on the Ranger’s front porch when dad spotted a man, who was camping in the park, walking to the bath house.  He raced over to the man and told him our pitiful story.  He told us the code to the lock so Josh and Dad ran back to the RV and the rest of us.  We unlocked the gate and headed to the sites, when we had to get the van off of the back of the RV. We were getting the van off when the Ranger came up to us and told us that we weren’t supposed to be there and that the man should not have given us the code.  When Dad told him that our RV wasn’t working and he saw all of the 7 of us, I think he felt bad.  He let us stay at site number 7 and we went to bed. 

Yesterday morning we got up with the sun, literally, and started getting everything out of the compartments of the old RV.  We had no idea what RV Mr. Terry was bringing, so we were totally in the dark.  We had bundles of clothes, dishes, food and even cereal all over the RV.  By the time Mr. Terry got to the campground, we had all our stuff ready to move to the new vehicle.  We parked them side by side and formed a “bucket brigade” to hand the stuff from one RV to the other.  It took about 2 hours to go through the whole process, including talking!

Panorama of the driver's side of RV number 2!

The new RV, it has a slide on each side!

Panorama of Passenger side of RV number 2 !