Finally at the Shore--February 3

As we leave the campground our camp hostess stops us to check if our site was okay. We search for a Napa store; Ms Garmin can’t find it, but the iPhone can. Norb needs a socket to fit over our drain plug for the hot water tank. He needs to know that we can extract it again before we tighten it and fill the tank. We find a Napa in Demopolis and they have just what we need.

We travel the backroads of Alabama to the Mobile area, where we finally connect with an interstate. There is lots of water here! We cross the bay at Mobile and then head south for another 22 miles before we turn west to our RV park. We had tried to make a reservation at Gulf State Park. No go. We did get a reservation at Island Retreat RV Park in Gulf Shores. We check in, get a map, find out about everything going on (euchre tonight, a free cookout Thursday, a bike trail that goes right along the edge of the park) and head for our campsite. When we are ensconced we walk the perimeter and find that there are 2 other open spaces. The man parked next to us has been here since December and won’t head home to Michigan until April.

We go to the community center for Euchre. These people are all from the Midwest—Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio. There are 7 tables of 4 playing, and 2 ‘leftovers’. It’s a good way to meet the people in the park and have short, introductory conversations. You can tell a lot about people when you play cards with them, and we come away with an idea of who we might want to meet again. We walk home with Ed, our neighbor, and find out about good places to ride our bikes. Tomorrow they come off the back. I don’t care how cold it is. The weather has been a constant source of conversation because the forecast is for 28 degrees tonight.

Home again we play with connecting the TV to the cable, the first time this trip we have even thought about putting it on. But, hey, it’s there and it’s free. Now if only we had headphones for it so that I could read and Norb could watch.