Day 1: Travel Day - Home to Tishomingo State Park, MS

April 15, 2014

North To Alaska – we are off on our long awaited adventure today at 0833. The beginning mileage on Fred (the motor home) was 25,024 and 5,749 on the truck.  We will see how many miles we travel before returning home in a few months. 

Mile Zero

Wow!  It is hard to believe that this day has finally arrived.  Exciting - and a little scary.  Guess it is somehow appropriate that winter returned to Alabama on the day we left for Alaska.  It was so very cold.  Our hands froze as we hooked up the truck to the tow bar.  The wind was gusting to about 30mph so it was not a relaxing drive with that wind hitting us broadside.  If we had not had an appointment in Red Bay we would have just put off our departure a day but....with our prayers and many of our friends’ prayers and words of encouragement, we made it safely to our appointment at Custom RV in Red Bay, Alabama.  They made short work of installing the new tank monitoring system we wanted since we will be "off grid" a lot during this trip. They, as usual, did a great job. 

Custom RV

Then we drove the 22 miles to Tishomingo State Park just off the Natchez Trace in Tishomingo, Mississippi.  We have not been to this park before and as a matter of fact we have never spent the night in Mississippi in Fred so now we get to color in another state!  The park is quiet and has some nice hiking trails, several geocaches and three disc golf courses we plan to investigate tomorrow.  By the way, since we love wild life and wild life photography, we will be keeping a log of our sightings.  Today – a buzzard, wild turkey and an owl. Scout of course sighted some squirrels and we saw our first bear of the trip. 

First Bear Sighting

 We are going to take a day or two to relax here, recoup from the hectic pace of the past few weeks and then move on north and west based on the weather.  We have no set itinerary for the next few weeks. We will just let you know as it happens.