Miscellaneous

First things first, I want to wish a very Happy Birthday to Micah, my nephew.  Have a great one, “Sweet Face”, and we can’t wait to see you this weekend!

We’re still in Millington, TN for the next few hours and will be moving on down the road this afternoon to somewhere in Arkansas.  We didn’t do much of anything yesterday except a grocery run to Wal Mart and to fill up with diesel.  Other than that and another really nice nap for me, we watched a movie and enjoyed each other’s company.  The extra day here in this great RV park has been really nice.
 
I’m getting excited to see all my family this weekend and really pleased that the weather report so far is calling for slightly cooler temperatures and no rain.  DeWayne’s birthday is Friday and as usual, I have no clue what to get him that would be a surprise.  Anyway, if I don’t post for a while, it will be because I’m too busy having fun, eating, playing dominoes or poker, eating, visiting with the family, and eating.  Oh, and did I mention eating?

That’s about all the news and we’ll be staying in Wal Mart parking lot tonight before we arrive back home tomorrow. 

Since I don’t have any new pictures to post, I’ll brag a little with some of the ones I have on my new computer (most of mine are still on my old PC).  I have some that I copied from my old blog site and a few that I’ve copied from facebook, so I’ll share a few:

Scott, DeWayne's son admiring a boulder on our vacation to Colorado.

That is Jana and Renee (granddaughters) at Beaver’s Bend state park in Broken Bow, OK about 10 years ago.  Ginger took an entire roll of film that day and we both fell in love with this picture.


That is my Kevin and Ginger in 1977 at a dinner/dance event we attended.  They had been watching the “jitterbug” on Sesame Street, so they had to get in on the action. 


Snookie, this one is for you.  And the reason you won’t see me venture very far out into the ocean.


Us in Branson 7 years ago.  Handsome cowboy, don’t you think?  And rich too!


Curt (my favorite son-in-law) helping my little man Casey with a project.  Love the hard hats for such a big project.


The pontoon boat that we spent so many weekends enjoying on the lake. 


Kevin’s twins Ace and Levi.  They are every bit as sweet as they look!


I love this picture of Jason and Jami!  Jason is DeWayne’s oldest of three boys. 

 
Jason again with son Carter and DeWayne’s youngest son Kevin with son Jaxon.  Good looking bunch of guys!


My son Tommy manning the grill on our back porch.  He’s a really good cook and handsome to boot!


Miss Jana again, all grown up and in high school.  Lord, where did all those years go?

Okay, that was a random tour of my picture file that has nothing to do with our travels, but I take every opportunity to brag about my favorite things.  If I ever get the pictures transferred from my old PC, I’ll be bragging some more. 

Well, that’s all for now, so tune in again in a few days for headlines and pictures from the reunion.  And in the meantime…….HAPPY TRAILS everybody!

Where’s Antonio?

We are still close to Memphis at a Navy facility that is really nice!  In fact, we decided we liked it so much and since DeWayne wants to try out the golf course, we’ve extended our stay until Wednesday.

We’ve done a little maintenance around the house today.  I washed the sheets and then wrestled the “Beast” (that monster mattress) to get the clean ones back on, but oh how I love clean sheets!  It was so pretty today that I was longing to have a place to hang them outside to dry, but short of draping on the picnic table, that just wasn’t gonna happen.

The next thing on my agenda this afternoon was a nice long nap.  Our travel schedule has caught up with me and my body just kept yelling at me to give it some R&R, so that’s just what I did for two hours this afternoon.  And what a great nap it was too!  Ahhhhh.

One more chore on my list for today was to give “Antonio” a bath.  Antonio Moretti is a treasured friend of mine that loves to help me out in the kitchen, along with his cousin Salvador Moretti.  Salvador is usually there strictly for moral support, but he always manages to bring a smile to my face.  The two of them are very close, as this picture indicates.  They are in their usual places in the kitchen.  That’s Antonio on the left and Salvador on the right.
Oh dear, I see cobwebs!  Egads! 

Anyway, back to my story.  Antonio and Salvador came with us when we left home last month, but after the first stop (Jay, OK), Antonio was nowhere to be found and poor Salvador just looked so sad and lonely.  I looked EVERYWHERE to no avail.  Just how far could he go in such a confined space?  Oh well, I gave it up as an unsolved mystery…….

…….until a few days ago while we were parked at Bluff City, TN and getting ready to pull out.  There Antonio was….lying on the ground by the back bumper of the RV, all dirty and looking like he had been through a wringer.  Poor fella! 

I had suspected where poor Antonio had gone, but hadn’t wanted to put words to my fear.  It turned out that my suspicion was right on target that poor Antonio had fallen off his nail sometime on the road after Jay OK and was unceremoniously gobbled up by the slide-out when we reached our next destination.  He obviously held on in that cramped space for three weeks until he was just as unceremoniously spit out on the ground by the same evil slide-out.  So I scooped my friend up and put him away until the opportunity arose to give him some much needed TLC. 

Now Antonio is all washed and clean, returned to his rightful place close to Salvador and life is good once again. 

The moral to this story?  Don’t leave Antonio hanging out on a nail when Salvador is placed in a drawer for travel.  Now, they will ride together in safety.  And we’ll all be happier.  Oh, and here is Antonio after his much needed bath.

Good looking fella, huh? 

Okay, so much for my nonsense.  Did I hear a few amens? 

The weather was really nice today, but I looked out after my nap and the sun had disappeared, and DeWayne came in to say he thought it might rain, so I went out to investigate.  Sure enough, we had thunder clouds looming but no rain yet, so I, of course, went looking for the trusty camera again.  Did I mention I love clouds?  Yeah, I did.






It never did rain, but I enjoyed the clouds anyway.  I got a shot of our spot here in the RV park:

I love our “home” and the fact that our front and back yards can be anything we want.  If we don’t like one, we can just go find another one.  Antonio and Salvador are just a couple of things that make this “home” to me.  One thing I simply wouldn’t part with when we moved into the RV was my Kincaid print that DeWayne gave me our first Christmas together.  It’s one of the “Hometown Memories” series and we both love it.  I think it represents our “Mayberry” that we keep an eye out for as we travel.

We are looking forward to seeing everybody at the reunion and are anxious to get home for that this weekend.  For those of you that will be there, be sure and bring your smiles, your appetites, and your poker money!  hehe…..

That’s about all I can drag up to write about today, so I’ll sign off for now.  Thanks to all of you that stop by and check out our latest adventures.  I love to share them.

Tune in tomorrow to see if I have any more silly stories or updates.  In the meantime, HAPPY TRAILS!!!

TENNESSEE TRAVELS

Friday was an R&R day for us at the RV park in Bluff City, TN.  Other than doing a load of laundry and cooking spaghetti for supper, I just sat around, watched TV and played on the computer. 

We took our time leaving the RV park in Crossville yesterday, and pulled out just after noon and planned to take our time since we would be staying the night in Wal Mart parking lot.  With the summer heat, we try to arrive as late as possible since we can’t run the A/C on those occasions.  So we made quite a few stops along the way and still covered over 300 miles. 

As we made our way back through Bristol to the Interstate, I spotted their courthouse.  I have a thing for old courthouses and think they are just full of history and character.  I wouldn’t give you a plug nickel for one of the newer, more modern courthouses and think it’s a tragedy when I see one and know that it had to have replaced a much more picturesque old one.  Anyway, here it is:

Now, isn’t that gorgeous?  Love it!

Back on the interstate and making tracks, I once again, ooo-ed and ahh-ed at the scenery, but it was hard to get a good picture because of the haze in the air.  But I clicked away anyway.

I spotted this barn in the distance and had to get a shot:

We skirted just north of the Smokey Mountains and climbed a few mountains ourselves:

I noticed an abundance of cedar trees mixed in with the hardwood:

Hey, Tommy, is that one of your trucks?

We stopped at Crossland, Tennessee to visit the Black & Decker outlet store in search of an air compressor and I knew we were getting closer to home when I saw this familiar grocery store sign across the street.  In fact, we parked in their lot and walked over to black and decker:

We didn’t find what we were looking for, so we were able to get back on the road without spending any money.  That’s always a good thing, don’t you think?  I do! 

What did we see from there?  I’ll let the pictures do the talking:

 

About this time, I started noticing the clouds in the distance.  Besides old courthouses and handsome hubby, another of my favorite things to look at are clouds.  Especially thunderheads!  And the closer we got to Nashville, the bigger they got.

And just about the time we started around the bypass at Nashville, this was in our windshield:

And then then the rain came…..boy oh boy, did it rain, complete with lots of lightning and thunder!

I took this next one as a sign that the storm was about over.

I looked up and discovered that the temperature had dropped 15 degrees, which was nice…….very nice.

There were more clouds on the horizon, but the rain for us was over.  On down the road we went and the temperature slowly rose once again.  But the scenery was breathtaking.

I got busy with the computer and wasn’t watching when DeWayne said “Grab the camera.  You’re gonna want to get this”, so I did.

It was a beautiful sunset.  And more thunderheads as the sun was setting:

 

See, I’m easily entertained.  Just give me a sky full of thunder clouds and it’s a cheap thrill for me.  But it was getting dark, the battery was getting low on the camera, and we arrived at Dickson, TN at our designated “home” for the night – Wal Mart.  We took our showers, opened the windows and crashed for the night.  Ahhhh, that bed felt soooooo good!

We roused fairly early this morning since our bodies are still stuck on eastern time, got breakfast and coffee out of the way (compliments of McDonalds), I secured the RV while DeWayne took his morning walk, and away we went, heading west toward Memphis.  We only had 165 miles to cover today, so once again, we took our time.  We stopped at Lowe’s on the way back to the Interstate and found the air compressor that DeWayne was looking for, then stopped here and there for coffee, bathroom, or lunch. 

We arrived here in Millington, Tennessee at the Naval facility around 2:00 this afternoon and were ready to get set up and park our tired butts for a couple of days.  Okay, we were prepared this time.  We had our I.D.s and truck registration out and ready for security at the gate.  We’re on top of it, by George………..wrong!  The lady said she wanted to see I.D.s…..check…….insurance verification….oops, that’s a new one, but no problem, it’s right in the glove box……truck registration……check!  We’re so proud of ourselves until she says the old familiar, “This is NOT your registration and your insurance verification has expired”.  Okay, we did have a current verification, so we traded the new one for the old one, which I promptly tore into shreds to avoid that boo-boo again.  But then there was the registration issue.  Once again, we explained that what we gave her WAS our registration and it’s all that Oklahoma provides when registering a vehicle.  Okay, she says, but this one expired in April…..

Damn!

Let me add at this point that this “lady” was none too friendly and….well I’ll just say downright rude!  DeWayne was none too happy with her and her attitude, and I wasn’t either.  She went to call whoever she needed to call and DeWayne got out of the truck to go in the RV to see if he could find the current registration, which we both knew we had, and she made him get back in the truck.  So we waited and filled our time comparing what we thought of the “nice lady” and her “endearing and understanding demeanor”……..so to speak. 

After a few minutes, a really nice base police officer arrived and DeWayne explained that the papers we had were actually registration papers issued in Oklahoma (why is that so hard to believe?), but that we had put the wrong copy in the truck and that he would have to be allowed to exit the truck to get the correct copy.  Okay, no problem.  So in he went to retrieve the lock box once again, brought it out and dug for the current copy……..it wasn’t there……

Double damn!

The nice officer (bless his heart) looked at the truck tag and the RV tag, which were both current, so he issued us a pass and even removed barriers for us to make it easier to get the RV through.  See, they had barriers on both sides of the road that were staggered, which forces everybody to drive in a tight zig-zag pattern to the next gate.  After pulling up to get out the way of traffic to get the registration fiasco taken care of, it was looking pretty impossible to maneuver the first set of barriers without backing up.  Long story short, we were up and going and actually smiling again in no time.  Thank you, nice officer.  Lady at the gate?  Well, you know what you can do with your attitude! 

We followed the directions and turned right at the commissary and sure enough, there was the RV park and I fell in love.  It’s laid with a central road and circled cul-de-sacs lined up on both sides.  The sites are wide and easy to access, with lots of grass and trees to enjoy.  I took this picture as we approached:

DeWayne backed the RV into the slot we picked out in no time and it didn’t take long at all to get set up and settled in.  Most all the slots I could see had huge Sycamore trees and shade and we picked the first one we came to that was empty that has great shade trees and, it turns, is about 30 feet from the laundry.  While DeWayne took his walk, I opened the curtains in the bedroom and the view was so pretty that I had to get the camera and get some pictures of the view from that window.  Here are the views looking left, center and to the right:

We will be here until Tuesday or possibly Wednesday.  We had planned to leave here Tuesday and spend another night in Wal Mart parking lot somewhere in Arkansas, then finish the trip home on Wednesday, but we may wait until Wednesday and drive the entire distance, which I’m voting for.  I wouldn’t mind spending an extra day here at all! 

That’s about all I can think of to say, but I realize that I have been forgetting to post the puppy pictures.  I’ve about run through all the ones that are on this computer, but DeWayne has my old PC now that has hundreds of them, so I’ll download some tomorrow onto my jump drive and transfer onto this computer.  I think I have one left on this one that I haven’t posted yet, so here it is:

Well, that’s all folks.  Tune in next time for another episode of “The Breeze”, but until then……HAPPY TRAILS!!!