Thursday, Feb 4

It rained all day today. We had a relatively short drive to Birmingham, Alabama. We overnighted in a Walmart south of the city.

As I have posted elsewhere, many RVers like boondocking (camping without any water or electrical hookups) in Walmart parking lots. While the company doesn’t officially endorse it, most of the stores allow it. They are convenient, usually fairly safe, and you can go shopping for any items you might need.

Upon our arrival at Walmart, we were dismayed to find several puddles inside the Argosy. We had leaks. While this was not a surprise (I had planned to do some caulking once we hit Florida), it was still annoying!

Once we cleaned up the puddles and put down bowls to catch any future accumulation, we headed into the Walmart. Our shopping list was short: Wine, Cat Treats & getting our prescriptions refilled. A lot of full time RVers use Walmart for prescriptions because Walmarts are everywhere and any of their stores can refill your prescriptions. It was late in the afternoon when we arrived, so our prescriptions would not be ready until the next morning.

It rained, hard, all night. The cats were uneasy, due to the rain noise on the trailer roof, so they made sure we didn’t get a lot of sleep as well

Friday, Feb 5

The rain stopped around 7 AM. We fixed breakfast then picked up our prescriptions from the Walmart pharmacy.

We made a quick stop at the Salvation Army across the street (Ann LOVES thrift stores), where Ann found a couple of blouses and a few other “treasures”. We then hit the road for Florida.

Around 5PM we arrived at the Mystic Springs Airstream Park, a RV park for WBCCI (the Airstream Owner’s Club) members.

Saturday, Feb 6

First thing on the agenda for today was to wash and seal the trailer. The trailer was in BAD need of a bath, having been sitting in our driveway all winter. I managed to dig out my ladder from the front of the pickup’s bed (not an easy taks, considering the amount of stuff we have in there), and set to work. A few hours later, the task was complete.

I then proceeded to caulk all of the know problem areas in hopes that our leaks will go away.

We made a quick trip into the local town, Century, FL, to check e-mail at the library and to pick up a few groceries. It turns out that they have a Piggly Wiggly store. I hadn’t seen one of these in years!

Sunday, Feb 6

Today we went into Pensacola, FL, to see the Museum at the Naval Air Station. It is a very interesting place, assuming you are into airplanes.

They have a LOT of planes there, both inside and out. One of the more interesting ones, to me, at least, was the plane that made the first trans Atlantic flight. It was an Air Force boat plane, known as the NC-4. The trip took 19 days, with multiple stops made along the way.

Sunday night the Saints beat the Colts in the Super Bowl, so all is well with the world…

Monday, Feb 7

We pack up and head to Mobile, Alabama. We are stopping in Mobile for several reasons, the main one being that we want to meet up with a friend of ours, Towner.

Towner is our “Mr. Fixit” in Cincinnati. He has put a new roof on our house, remodeled a bathroom and added a deck, amongst other things. Several years ago he decided to start wintering in Mobile, where he has family. He bought a “Fixer Upper” there and has been working on it, along with working paying gigs, every Winter since.

We pull into Meaher State Park, which sits on the East side of Mobile Bay, just outside the city of Mobile. It is a small, but well kept up campground. When we pulled in and asked for a site, the ranger said we would have to be in the “old” section. What that turned out to mean was they had recently remodelled the campground, adding a bunch of new full hookup paved sites. They kept the old camp sites, which were not paved and did not have water and sewer hook ups. We stayed in one of those, which was fine with us.

We met Towner at a local restaurant, and had a few local beers while we talked.

Then it was off to downtown Mobile for the other reason we wanted to stop there: Mardi Gras!

Mobile claims to be the birth place of Mardi Gras in the United States. According to Wikipedia, it was started in 1703 by the French Catholics who lived there as a way to get the “excesses” out of their system before the start of Lent.

Nowadays, they have a week of parades, usually several every night. The ones we saw were relatively small, but were a lot of fun to watch.

There were a lot of families with kids at the parade, and the parade participants threw out a lot of stuffed animals and other items kids would like.

Tuesday, Feb 8

The weather report says that there will be snow overnight tonight. We had originally planned to stay Tuesday evening at a Casino in Biloxi, MS, but decided that it would be wised to just head to New Orleans.

We take off from the State Park, intending to take US-90 along the Gulf coast. However, as soon as I pulled out onto the highway that fronts the Park, I hit the brakes to make the turn and the brake pedal sinks all the way to the floor! Fortunately, the trailer’s brakes were not effected by this, so they actually stopped the truck as I pulled to the side of the highway.

It appears that we have a broken brake line, as brake fluid sprays out over the right rear tire when the brake pedal is pressed. I call our RV roadside assistance service, Allstate’s RV Roadhelp, to arrange for a tow. We have had this service for years, but this was the first time I had to use it for RV reasons (it also covers your autos, and we have used the service for that purpose several times). The agent I talked to was very friendly and patient, as it took a while to find a tow service willing to take both the truck and the trailer. I highly recommend this service to other RVers.

A while later a large tow truck pulls up, hooks up to the fron to the truck, and proceeds to tow us, with the trailer still hooked up to the truck, to a local Ford dealer, Treadwell Ford. The dealership was located next to a Mall, so the tow truck driver dropped the trailer in the Mall parking lot and then took the truck to the dealership.

A couple of hours later we get the bad news: The brake kine between the master cylinder and the rear axle was in bad shape and needed to be replaced. This would not be finished by the end of the day, due to the need for parts that wouldn’t be in until the next morning.

We were getting ready to spend the night in the Mall parking lot (below freezing temps are predicted) when one of the dealership trucks pulls up and the service tech who was working on the truck pops out and proceeds to hook our trailer to their truck. They haul the trailer to the dealership parking lot, then run an extension cord out so we would be able to run our electric heater that night.

The next afternoon we take off for New Orleans, $1000 poorer, but glad we managed to survive a “no brakes” situation as well as we had. Had it occurred the night before, when we were going 70 MPH on the freeway with no trailer to slow us down, then things could have turned much much worse…