Gunter Hill Corp of Engineers Campground

We found out that Birmingham had heavy rain all weekend, so our timing for a road trip to Arkansas was perfect. We spent one more night at our campground outside of Birmingham, and one more walk to the lake to check on Mother Goose. Still no goslings!

Then we were on the road again towards Gunter Hill Corp of Engineers Campground outside of Montgomery, Alabama. We know that it is tough to find a campground for holiday weekends like Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. We are also finding that it can be tough to find a place for spring break. In fact, all of the reservable sites at Gunter Hill were booked. But they have a few walk-in sites that were open on a first-come-first-served basis. We have found that changing campgrounds on a Monday gives us the advantage of finding a place right after the weekenders had to return to work. So we scored a nice place in a wooded area without a reservation even during spring break!

It took us a while to get level in our site, and I'm sure we were very entertaining while we went through the fiasco of adding leveling mats under the tires and jacks. Some of the folks we were entertaining were our new neighbors. A group of friends from Alabama met here for the week, and welcomed us into their campfire circle several nights.

They greeted us with gifts of a box of desserts and two colas. We were living a line out of the song, "Lifestyles of the Not so Rich and Famous." We have to hum along with the line from that song that poetically describes us, "Our champagne and caviar is a RC cola and a moon pie."

We would also enjoy a nice camp fire, and one of our favorite dinners--hot dogs and 8-marshmallow smores! Our new home is on the bend of Catoma Creek, and we hope to have the kayak on the water before we leave here.

We have been riding our bikes around the park as well, with a nice ride through the newly-budding forest.

This is the first time in our lives to spend a spring in a forest. We are finding that there is a price to pay for all this delicious shade. It's our first time to experience buckets of tree pollen. Our motor home and car are looking very yellow these days, covered with a layer of pollen. All this budding and blooming are sparked by unseasonably warm temperatures for March. We broke the record for the high temperature by 3 degrees as we hit 89 degrees one day.

Just as we are feeling very local as we suffer through the affects of the pollen, we are also sampling new local delicacies. We kept seeing fruit stands advertising "boiled peanuts," so of course we had to buy some. Obviously boiled in salt water, they are an interesting snack. Denisa popped open one peanut shell to show the transformed soft and salty nuts inside.

We also include a picture of another local. This lizard is thinking about hitching a ride to our next location, as he practices perching on our windshield wipers. Notice that beautiful yellow powdery pollen surrounding him on the windshield.

Now that we are settled into another campground, we are ready to explore the area around Gunter Hill.