September 10th-12th

We enjoyed some downtime around the Prairie creek campground in Alabama. Our day was filled with watching football, bike rides, color battle (see below), reading, painting rocks and a beautiful sunset. The calm before the storm.

Family Bike ride

sunset over Alabama River

Watching Football

Color Battle- let me explain. When we were planning this adventure, Abby asked if she could go to public school for at least a month before we took off on this adventure. She really wanted to experience middle school. We agreed. They started school on July 31st so we agreed her last day would be August 31st. Well… then the school announced they were going to hold a fundraising event that concluded with The Color Battle. The Color Battle is an event where the whole school changes into white t-shirts, goes outside and throws packets of colored powder at each other. The event was to be held on September 1st. Abby came home from hearing this announcement and bagged to stay for it. It sounded like so much fun so we agreed. We donated money so that she could earn color packets. On Thursday August 31st, Durham middle school announced they were postponing The Color Battle because of the forecasted rain. Abby apparently found the person in charge of the event during her lunch period and explained that we postponed our move because of this event and asked her to reconsider the postponement with tears running down her face. I knew this occurred even before Abby got home from school because the women called me to tell me how upset Abby was and told me that she’d send two t-shirts and 5 color packets home with Abby. That helped lessen the blow a bit., especially when it never even rained the next day!

We brought the bag of goodies on our trip and decided that today was a great day to have a family color battle of our own. I’m not sure what they did at the school to protect eyes from powder but I had everyone wear swim googles, yes, I am a geek. Here is our epic battle. We may have had colored hair for a few days but it was worth it to see the excitement in Abby’s eyes.

On the Monday the bad wind and rain, leftover from IRMA, came through so we had to bring the slides in on the RV and stay inside all day. Chris was working at his desk so the girls and I did our schooling in the bedroom. At night we introduced the girls to Phase Ten card game.

The only damage we had was a tree branch fell on the hood my jeep. 😦 I will have a dent to remember it by.

The next day the girls hid rocks that they painted before we headed off toward Florida.

No-one was answering the phones at Disney’s Fort Wilderness campground in Orlando where we had reservations at for the 13th-18th. We were trying to confirm our reservation. We decided to head that direction anyway. We stopped in the Colquitt, GA to spend the night. It was a quaint RV park (Emerald RV park) in the middle of the peanut fields. I called the local peanut factory, Birdsong, to see if we could tour it but they said no, that’s the same response I received from the Golden peanut company in Ashburn, GA. Very disappointed.

I spent the next morning calling other RV parks in the Orlando area to stay at because Fort Wilderness emailed us the night before stating they were closed until the 18th because of the damage on property. We had to stay in Orlando because Chris had a flight out for business on Friday morning.

After 3 hours of calling, the closest RV park I found that was open and had power was in Daytona Beach, FL. There could be worse places, right? 🙂

Back to Florida we go.