This amazing journey is coming to an end and it is time to make our way back to Colorado. We woke up, later than we should have, I don’t think any of us want to go. We started getting ready. John went down to cash in our last four meals for breakfast. He came back with 4 meal boxes. Each one had scrambled eggs, 2 sausage links, bacon, tater tots and 2 gluten free Mickey waffles. We also had a bag of butter, jelly and syrup. We got out some paper plates and put all the food in the middle of the table. Trista’s eyes were big looking at it all and she asked John, “Why did you order so much breakfast??”
“Because we already paid for it, we took what came with the plan!” (For the record, this covered three breakfasts for us! And we still have lots of Barbecue in our freezer. Honestly, we returned home with more food in our fridge and freezer than we left with! Good thing I won’t have to cook much this week)!
We finally set off with Trista and I at the table with homework out. It didn’t take long at all for both kids to fall sound asleep. Trista hanging off the side of the booth bench and Levi made himself a nest between the bed and the back wall of the RV. I took a picture of a rare Bubadub nest with the Bubadub still in it!
We were pretty low energy in the back and I have no idea how John stayed so alert driving through Florida!
We finally stopped at a rest area to have dinner. While I was heating up Barbecue, Levi said, “There is a police behind us.”
All of the blinds were closed for him to see out the back and I didn’t see any flashing lights. I looked at our rear view camera and it turned off when the car turned off, so we couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. I asked if he saw red and blue lights and he said, “No, I didn’t see any lights, just his car.” Finally, we realized that he was able to see the police car in the passenger side mirror, it was a good height for him, but too low for it to be obvious to the rest of us. I could see headlights shining through our back window. I just wanted to lay low, but there was clearly a police officer that pulled right in behind us, sharing our parking spot. John poked his head out and then hurried back in. “He’s giving a ticket to the guy NEXT to us!” We went about our dinner prep and along came another police car. I don’t know what was going on, but we had too much stuff out to drive off! Pretty soon the truck getting a ticket pulled away and then eventually both police cars did too. Strange.
We had the kids get in their pjs and set them up to sleep on the couch. They fell asleep and I sat up with John. We wanted to see some things through Alabama and Mississippi, but decided that if we pushed a little farther and got up super early the next day, we could actually have one more off day before our final day of driving. These long days with lots of driving are really hard. As tired as we all were, two was hard, four in row might kill us. So we pressed on with our new plan.
We did take a detour into Biloxi. John spent 10 months there in the military and we drove by the base. He kept saying what a dirty little town it was and it is! There was some kind of car show going on, there were people lining most of the main roads in lawn chairs for miles and miles at 11pm. We did see some really cool cars and pretty much any open spot in town had an RV parked on it. We have no idea what that was all about, but it was interesting.
Through the app that we use, we found that there was a good, safe Walmart that allows overnight parking in Sliddell, LA. We made our way there and there were other RVs and some semis with their generators running. We pulled in with them so that we could run ours and keep the air conditioning on – so hot! We laid down to sleep somewhere around 1am and as soon as we laid down I heard chainsaws. Now I am wide awake. “John, do you hear chainsaws?!?!”
“Yep… zzzzzzzzz…”
How this man can fall asleep when his family is sleeping at a Walmart and we are hearing chainsaws is beyond me! I woke him up again. He finally looked out the window and discovered that they were not chainsaws, they were leaf blowers. But of course! Walmart stocks their grocery shelves all day long while people are trying to shop, why wouldn’t they groom their parking lots in the middle of the night! Silly me.