My Hometown

We made our way over to Tuscaloosa, AL to help my Mom during her recovery from minor surgery.  On the way, we stopped for a week in Auburn to move the items we have in storage to a better climate controlled storage unit.  Full-time RV folks must weight the cost of long-term storage vs the value of those items you want to keep.  Is Grandpa’s dresser and all that other stuff really worth the $4,000 it is going to cost you to store it for three years (our estimate for full timing) or are you better off selling it and buying new stuff later?  Our decision is to keep the stuff and pay for storage.

While in Auburn we spent time at the mobile home we bought for our sons to live in while attending college.  It always seems to need cleaning and fixing.  We do enjoy our time visiting with them and even had a chance to celebrate Chris’ 20^th birthday.  Of course, our food budget for the month was blown taking them out to eat, but that is to be expected. 

In Tuscaloosa, we spent most of our time with Mom helping her around her house while her toe healed from minor surgery.  We celebrated my brother-in-law’s birthday and were able to spend time with extended family.  We also celebrated our 29^th wedding anniversary with a nice dinner out.  During this time, the Washington, D.C. area where we last lived was hit with heavy snow.  I took a picture of the snowfall in Tuscaloosa and sent to my friends there to show them we also got hit.  Look close and you can see a few flakes falling.

We left Mom’s place after the doctor told her she was doing fine and headed south toward Houston, TX where we plan to have our AquaHot system (a new replacement system installed at the time we purchased The Bus) repaired by Rudy Legett a specialist recommended through on-line forums.  We stopped at Cracker Barrel for lunch as we passed through my hometown of Greenville, AL.  While we were eating, I said to Pattie that it had been several years since I was here and that I wished I had time to stay and visit some old friends.  She gave me a duh sort of look and said, “Then just do it! We are making this up as we go.”  I thought for a second then placed a call to Sherling Lake Park to see if they had a space for us for…uh…three nights.  They had space and after lunch we were met at the office and escorted to a nice pad with full hook-up. 

We took a drive around town seeing all the changes that have taken place over the years.  It was good to see many of the old landmarks and businesses still in place.  We visited my father’s gravesite and met with the funeral director. I made contact with some old friends and we were able to visit with a few of them.  Pete and Merle Newton are good family friends and Pete was my Sunday school teacher during those critical teenage years. They are long time RV’ers and were excited to hear about our adventures and plans. They told us about several of their favorite places to visit and we exchanged notes. Roger Nicholas was my best friend in high school and he invited us out to his farm to practice our shooting skills.  Roger and I shot competitively on the high school rifle team back when they had such things. Later, Pattie and I explored some back roads in the Jeep enough to get it covered in red clay mud. 

After our three days, we resumed our trip to Houston heading south to Mobile, AL and then west into Louisiana where we stopped for a single night in a Wal-Mart parking lot.  The Bus is fully self-contained, so if we only need to stop for a single night along the way, it saves a couple bucks to stop at one of the many places that will let you stay free for one night.  The AllStays app is great for locating these places. However, there is certain etiquettes that should be observed when staying overnight such as: ask permission, park with a minimum footprint (no slides protruding into parking lot, no awnings out, no grills and chairs out), don’t lower jack stands that may harm pavement, always patronize the business.  We like Wal-Mart because we can pick up supplies and their parking lots are covered with security cameras and frequent police patrols. 

Thanks for keepingupwiththejonesrv!