It's a tad cool…..

Sleet all night here at Fort Pickens Campground, Gulf Shores National Park, south of Pensacola, FL.  We could hear it battering the outside of the camper pretty much throughout the night, and periodically would hear a chunk of ice crack and slide off the side of the aluminum skin; our little airstream has kept us snug and warm with use of just a small, 30-year old electric heater, but we are pretty stuck here for now, since we cannot get into the truck!

This same layer of ice covers everything outside.  I know this is nothing compared to the three foot drifts our Michigan friends and neighbors have been experiencing, but it's somehow disconcerting to see palm trees and live oaks coated in ice, and having the truck so covered in the stuff that we cannot hope to open a door until it warms.  Even a hair dryer on the hottest setting did nothing to melt this stuff.

We've extended our stay here by a couple of days, now won't leave until Monday.  We're hoping to have another day or two of pretty sunsets such as the ones we had earlier in our stay, since they are predicting a definite warming over the weekend.

New Neighbor

Although we were fascinated by this little fellow rooting around our neighboring campsite, the campground host referred to him as "Possum on the half-shell" and "ugliest thing imaginable"; guess as with all things, it's a matter of perspective, and since close-up encounters with armadillos are rare in OUR experience, we continue to think he is cute and fascinating :)

Check him out in action here: http://youtu.be/GVqBoxgSveo

Worth Driving 1000 Miles

"Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me

The cold and sparkling silver of the sea" – Sara Teasdale

We are camped for the next 7 days at Fort Pickens Campground, Gulf Shores National Park.  Still cool,   but so beautiful!  I had forgotten how white the sand in this area is - it looks like snow.

Getting Warmer

"...From years gone by came sweet recall, 
Of how warm warm could be, 
Regardless of the snowflakes' fall…"  (Denis Martindale)

This was this morning when we got up, to 7 degrees Fahrenheit:

Even Murphy was struggling to remain warm: 

Now we are in Alabama, listening to John Denver's "Sunshine on my Shoulders" playing from our iPod, and the temperature is actually above freezing!

We're spending the night in another KOA, south of Birmingham, AL where it's finally warm enough (45 degrees F), for John to de-winterize the camper and get the water tanks cleared out and filled, etc.  Not too exciting - not a destination campground - but clean park and facilities, pleasant staff, all the amenities we need, and most importantly - temps above freezing, which at this point is a luxury! 

Tomorrow we head to Fort Pickens Campground, Gulf Island National Seashore, FL to spend the next 7 days.  This is not what we planned when we left and were heading to Louisiana, but when we realized how close we would be to a National Park campground that we visited 2 years ago and really enjoyed, we decided to make a detour in our plans, and go there as our first "destination campground" (as opposed to transition-campgrounds such as this KOA, where we only spend a night while moving through an area).  We both love this aspect of retirement: the ability to make spur-of-the moment decisions and changes in our travel plans.  Life is good!  

Blow, blow, thou winter wind… (Shakespeare, As You Like It).

We're on the road again, heading south, but not quickly enough to avoid the extremely chilly winter weather in Michigan, or, at the moment, on the Indiana/Kentucky border.  We've been keeping an eye on the weather looking for the perfect window of opportunity to make it from Michigan to Louisiana, and that "perfect window" just hasn't presented itself, so this morning we made a run for it, with snow swirling and blowing as we left, but major highways reported as dry and safe.  Temperature at home as we left this morning was 8 degrees Fahrenheit - by the time we settled in for the evening in a Louisville, Kentucky KOA campground, it was a balmy 18 degrees Fahrenheit, with a prediction of 4 degrees temp. for tonight.   No photos from today for this post - it's just too dang cold to stand outside and try to frame a picture, although here is one from a few days ago at home, as we were getting our little silver home-away-from-home ready for this trip.