Our First Night at Walmart

After over thirteen months on the road, we have finally experienced another first--our first overnight in a Walmart parking lot!

After a day driving up the Natchez Trace, we were a little too far away from our next destination to push on.  While we were still working, we would drive 8-10 hours per day on vacation to get to a destination. Now a 3 hour driving day seems huge. So after checking with Walmart management and doing some obligatory shopping, we bedded down for the night in the parking lot. 

It was the perfect temperature outside, so we didn't need any heater or air conditioner inside.  That makes parking with no hook-ups easy. We have a generator that needs to be "exercised" once each month.  Since we have had electrical hook-ups for the last month, it was a good time to run the generator for an hour to bring our batteries up to a full charge.  We left the car hooked up to the motor home and just walked to a local place for dinner that evening.  So it was a good experience for our first night at Walmart. There was the diesel truck noisily departing the parking lot at 1:00 a.m., but we would do it again.

We filled up with Walmart diesel before we left the parking lot the next morning. We had half of the diesel pumped, when the electricity went off. Our fast fill-up turned into a thirty minute waiting game, as it took that long to re-set the pumps when the electricity came back on. So our efforts to leave early were delayed, but we still arrived to our destination by 8:30 a.m. That would include crossing another state border into Alabama. As you can see from the sign, the Red Bay city limits are right on the state line.

Red Bay has been our ultimate destination for the last month when our bedroom slide-outs decided to quit working.  We thought the best place to get them fixed was the birthplace of our motor home. The tiny town is home to Tiffin Motor Home Industries, and it has a campground right beside the 49 service bays. We have never seen so many Tiffin motor homes in one place! They stretched as far as the camera could see.

We made the early morning drive, got checked into the campground, and still managed to make it to Sunday morning church services in Red Bay. Then we relaxed while watching the parade of motor homes coming into the campground for the rest of the day. We heard there were 25 Tiffin motor homes that checked in on Sunday.  With the ones already waiting in line for service, most of the 90 camping spots were filled by nightfall.

This morning we were at our first Walmart overnight camping spot, and tonight we were at our first Tiffin manufacturer's camping spot. It's a day of firsts!