And… We Made It!

9 Feb 2013

At last, one of our big destinations has been reached.  And with little time to spare, I might add.  We left the rest stop at 7:30 this morning after a night with thankfully, no incidence.  There was frost on the ground when we drove away.  We again took the back roads of Alabama to get to our destination, which probably doubled the time, but allows more of the flavor to come through.  I think more people live in single-wide trailers, than houses.  And from the looks of things, nature wins.  There were so many abandoned places along the way that were encircled with bushes and trees and a very invasive type of vine called Kudzu. Kudzu covers things even more efficiently than blackberry bushes.  I saw it crawling up street signs, up telephone poles and along the wires, over very tall trees and especially old barns, houses and trailers. It’s not green with leaves right now so the vine just looks invasively scary.

Most of the houses around here have nice big covered porches. One of the funniest things I saw today was someone’s red tractor sitting right up on the porch, in place of the usual lawn chair.  I’m thinking there was no woman living there.

It’s been cloudy the past few days but today we had glorious sunshine the whole day.  We arrived at the RV park next to the US Space and Rocket Center by 12:30.  The office is only open until 5pm, which is where the laundry room is located, so I had just enough time to take a hot shower and do two loads of laundry before they closed for the weekend.  Whew.  I so needed to wash clothes so Kaleb had something to wear next week, and we all needed a good, long, hot shower.  It was like a new world, afterwards. 

This RV park has everything we need here – hot showers, laundry facilities and high speed internet.  Life is sweet!  And we are just a short walk away from where Kaleb will be staying, so it satisfies the helicopter parent in me to know we are right next door.  The rocket launching area is right in front of the RV park so we walked over there and collected rocket parts for Kory and Kaleb to rebuild later.  If we are here when Kaleb does that part of camp, we’ll have a front row seat to the show.

Initially, Kory and I thought we’d go for an explore or something this week, but after all the driving we’ve done to get here, we are thinking that hanging out and watching movies on Netflix all week might not be a bad way to go.  There’s still a lot of roads in front of us that must be driven, so having some down time sounds pretty good at this point.  We’ll see what the week brings.  I’m just glad we made it.