While I was in the process of onboarding we were deciding when would be the best time to relocate to Charleston, and originally settled on November 1st.  But then Lee and I had our first ever Facetime call with Oliver and everything changed.  He is 12 weeks now, and really animated.  His eyes lit up when he heard my voice and both of us just melted when he started making noises.  So we moved up our plans by two weeks, and off we went.  It was a 1200 mile trip and we knew we could make it in 4 days with long driving days.  I was also interested to see how working in the truck would be.

Several years ago in 2015 Lee built me a setup so I could work in the car but unfortunately he had thrown all of that away just a little under a year ago because it hadn’t been used since I left that job in fall of 2015 and was taking up a ton of space in the rig storage. This time I decided to go with a laptop desk that I found at Best Buy and overall I would say I really like it.  I am a mouse person and this desk has a space for the mouse.  It also has some space for air between the cushions so it wasn’t very hot.  I will say that when the road was very bumpy the laptop screen bounced quite a bit but not sure if any solution would solve that.  The biggest problem I had was that Jack was pretty disgruntled because he likes to ride in my lap sometimes while we are traveling…sorry buddy, work comes first.

We made pretty good time on Friday, but when right before we stopped for the night in Louisiana I saw that Tropical Storm Nestor was supposed to make landfall right in our path.  From what I was seeing several areas were going to get 2-6 inches of rain, but more importantly the tropical storm was bringing tornadoes.  Some rain we could probably deal with but tornadoes not so much.   We did have some choices though.  Several highways went north along our route and since we hadn’t made any reservations we were able to change the route at will.  We really like traveling without reservations for exactly this reason, and we have hardly ever had an issue when we are traveling in the shoulder seasons.

 

After looking at our choices, we decided to sleep on it and see what path the storm took.  The next morning it turned out that it was farther east than they originally thought and it was ahead of us.  We were able to keep to our original route and only saw a few drops of rain the entire trip.  That was a nice bonus and helped us make really good time.

Friday night we ended up staying at Acadian Park Campground.  This is one of many parrish parks in Louisiana and although it was older and at $25 (cash only)  not that cheap we really liked it.  Most of the sites were smaller so they ended up putting us in a pull through that was actually part of the road, but we had a nice grass spot in front of us and it was a quiet campground.  I will say very few of the sites were level, although ours was pretty good.  I just really liked the overgrown feel.

 

 

The next day we started out and with minimal traffic we used Highway 12 to go north of New Orleans.  Traveling on Saturdays can be quite pleasant and I enjoyed being able to focus on the scenery instead of working.  Jack was happy to have my lap back as well.  The only hiccup was when I decided to stop at a roadside farmstand and got off the freeway without knowing if I would be able to get into the lot.  We have gotten much braver about these forays this year, but this time I turned in and wasn’t sure how to get out.  A truck was blocking my path, so I went inside and bought some apples, tomatoes, and local honey.  Lee was pretty annoyed with me and was wondering how I was planning on getting out when the owner came up and told us to feel free to drive across the grass.  That was so easy even I could do it and I felt a little vindicated although it certainly could have turned out much worse.  All in all we made good time as we crossed Mississippi and headed north into Alabama at Mobile.  We took turns driving and ended up going longer than we normally would, stopping for the night at a Passport America park called Owassa Lakeside RV Park.

 

 

 

As you can see from the picture it was early morning when we left (8:13am) and again we made good time.  We stopped for lunch at a Cracker Barrel with only 4 hours left in the drive and Lee asked me if I wanted to push through.  Under normal circumstances I would have said no, but I wouldn’t have to work from the truck on Monday and we could see our daughter sooner.  We ended up pulling into the KOA around 8:15 pm and it was pitch black.   It was a 13 hour day (we lost an hour to time change) and the site they had us in was a back in. Thankfully a nice man next door brought over a lantern for us and that along with a flashlight I held showed Lee the boundaries.  He did a stellar job backing in and I told him to leave lining it up until the next day.  We ate a sandwich and watched a little TV then both fell into bed, happy we would be staying still for awhile.

 

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