March 29, 2007 we left Lebanon Tennessee this morning and at 4:45 pm we arrived in Duck Creek RV Park in Paducah Kentucky. We just heard we are going to be running into some nasty storms when we head out tomorrow for Branson Missouri.
I forgot to write in my last blog, but while we were at the Grand Ole Opry show one of the tour groups there, that was mentioned, was a group of High School kids on a music tour from "Mayfair High School" from Lakewood California. That was neat to hear.
When we left this morning we back tracked before coming to Kentucky because we went to the "George Dickel Distillery" in Cascade Hollow in Tullahoma Tennessee. It was an interesting tour in a Dry County. George Dickel said his whiskey is so smooth that's why he spelled it "George Dickel Tennessee Whisky" without the "e" keeping with the Scotch whisky tradition. We bought a bottle but haven't tried it yet.
Anyway, Branson tomorrow, will write later.

March 28, 2007 well it rained just about all day today. It was a good day to do house cleaning and laundry right after I did my morning workout. Last night we went to the Grand Ole Opry, before the show we walked around the Opry Mill Mall, one of the biggest I think I have been in, then had dinner at Tony Roma's, haven't been to one of them for years. The Lebanon policeman that was at our coach today said that Opry Mill Mall use to be were the Opry amusement park was, so I guess that's why the area is so big. The reason the police where here is because to get the RV registration changed to Florida the vin. number needed to be verified by either a police officer or a Dealership if we weren't going to drive back to Florida. Dave called and they said they would come by and verify the number and sign the document for us. Anyway, back to the Grand Ole Opry, we walked thru the museum which was neat to see, then we went thru the Opry store and Tracy Lawrence was there signing his new CD. Before the show started at 7 pm Eddie Stubbs came out and explained that every show is live on the Radio so please do a lot of clapping and live commercials are being done too between singers. We didn't know any of the singers but the music was "OK" but it was very interesting to watch them do the live commercials and change the stage for the next singer or singing group coming up. It lasted 2 hours and we saw 8 different singing groups. The best thing about the whole thing is that Country Musician's biggest thrill is to sing at the Grand Ole Opry. Sorry but its hard to explain, as big as they get and tour all over the biggest thing to them is to appear at one spot, where things began. The music groups today, meaning rock and roll ect., they don't have 1 place that all the legends have crossed, which the Country Music has, which I/we think is really neat.
Enough of that, tomorrow we are headed out, 1 day ahead of time, and will stop in Kentucky, we want to get another marker on our placker. Will write later.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007 didn't mention that we are staying at Timberline Campground Resort. When we went into Wal-Mart after we got here, it's another small town with a bunch of inbreds. I told Dave that some of these people really scare me, he said him too, then when we got back to the campsite I went walking around and found out a lot of these inbreds live right here. I would say that about 75 % of the people here, live here and their trailers have seen better days. Last night while we were sitting outside watching TV I just started laughing, and Dave asked what was so funny. I told him we left a 7 hundred thousand dollar house to come stay in places like this, what the hell were we thinking. We can see how sheltered we were and not really seeing what is out there in the U.S.A., it's been fun and interesting though, and we have met some nice people which we would have never met if we just stayed in Simi. These parks are a part of the Coast to Coast program we bought into and we stay without paying that's why we stick it out, we are cheap. Well you know how it goes, you get what you pay for.
Yesterday we went into Nashville, it's about 30 miles away, and walked around. We had lunch at Rippy's Smokin' Bar & Grill then went into Legends Corner and had a beer and listened to the guitar player. During lunch Dave made reservations to go to the Grand Ole Opry on Tuesday night, tonight. Now don't be jealous but we are going to be seeing Tracy Lawrence, The Crabb Family, Porter Wagoner, The Isaacs, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver and Jason Michael Carroll. Will write later and let you all know how it was. That's it for now.

March 26, 2006 First thing we want to wish Kimberly Diane Alton a BIG HAPPY 25TH BIRTHDAY, as she says "she is half way to 30" that's our college grad. ha ha
Just a quick update on us. After leaving Florida our next stop was at Camping World right outside of Atlanta Georgia. We got one of those sleep number beds, they didn't have anyone to install it so Dave and I did it ourselves in their parking lot. Then got on the road again for a little while then stopped off at a KOA in Casterville Georgia. Sunday morning after a good nights sleep, the new mattress is really nice, we had breakfast then got back on the road.
We arrived in Lebanon Tennessee in the early afternoon and now we are back to Central Time Zone. Oh for got to mention that while we were at the Camping World we also purchased a CB Radio so Dave tore out the dashboard on the RV and installed the CB radio. My handle might be "Dog Grandma" will see once we start playing with it.
The weather has been perfect so far but we heard a storm is coming our way, will see. Will try and see Nashville and the surrounding area in between Dave's work calls.

March 23, 2007 we are here in Lake City, Florida. The 1st thing we did when we got here, after hooking up, we went to DMV and got our Florida Driver Licenses, opened up a bank account here, and did the laundry. We are now residents of Florida because they don't have personal income tax, which will save us money on Dave's retirement. Now they do have other ways to get your money like if you owned property, but we don't so we are OK there. It's basically too expensive to keep Calif. as our main residents. Will see if this all works, I hated giving up my Calif. drivers license though. Anyway, like I said in the other blog, we had a good time at the rally, the last day we booked a Piggyback Train thru Copper Canyon Tour. It's 29 days long, we start off at Presidio Texas and end up in Nogales Arizona. It's not until next January 24, 2008 so the cruise that we had booked for December will definitely be cancelled. Other then that expensive reservation we really didn't buy too much. New sensor for our tanks, mat for outside the coach, went to some seminars, some stuff we knew other stuff was informative. Hated to say Goodbye to the new friends that we had met at the pre-rally they were really great people. Shirley and Fred, Joe and Lucinda, Bobby and Louise, Rosemarie and Bob, Fran and Bond, Janice and Dewayne, Linda and Joe (also from Calif) and the others. The last day too of the rally we saw two couples that we had met at the Monaco repair place in Oregon last August.
The Oak Ridge Boys concert was pretty good, I hadn't heard any songs that I had known, Dave was napping thru part of it so we left early. We did so much walking and riding our bikes the 6 days that we were there that we were really very tired. It was nice to get back to the coach early and relax since we were hitting the road at 6 a.m.
Tomorrow we head out for Lebanon Tennessee will write again from there.

Thursday March 22, 2007 today is the last day of the FMCA Rally and we have had a really good time. The final count on the fair grounds was 3,820 family coaches, 260 exhibitor live-in coaches, 556 display coaches and 194 demo units to drive. Don't know how many vendors stayed in motels but I know it was a lot. They did sell a aerial photo, which we purchased, of all the rigs parked, hopefully Dave can scan it and we can post the picture on our website. It's the last day, I'm really tired, I have walked so much that I'll write more later. We head out for Florida tomorrow morning, we have appointments at one of the DMV's for new driver licenses, and I'll explain that more on my next blog. Need dinner now before the Oak Ridge Boys concert, will write later.

Tuesday March 20, 2007 today the FMCA Rally really begins. The drive over here on Saturday morning was fun, having the police blocking the traffic getting on the freeway and off was neat. Our caravan was only 35 rigs, the Monaco one that came in right behind us was 150 rigs. Boy I wouldn't be a happy camper if I was on my way somewhere and had to wait until all those rigs went thru. They are so well organized here, that have everyone parked right away and leave enough room between rigs, it was really nice. There wasn't the turn out they were hoping for there are only 3,800 rigs. I went to the 1st timers seminar yesterday and they told us that Perry, the town we are in, has only 9,000 population, with all of us in our rigs plus the vendors that are here we total over 11,000, more then Perry's population. They said the mayor of Perry is really happy to have us here. They have 550 new rigs to view here and 175 rigs out in the demo driving area. They did have some seminars yesterday that we went to. We went to Knee-Hip-Ankle Health, boring, then we split up because the seminars went on at the same time, that's when I went to the 1st timers and Dave went to RVing to Alaska. At 3 pm they opened up the gates to where all the 550 rigs are, boy you should have seen all the people lined up to get in there, we waited until the crowd cleared the gates before we went over. Today all the vendors open up, so now the spending begins. Now we will see all the stuff we just can't live without.

Friday, March 16, 2007, today is the last day of the pre-rally. We have had a lot of fun meeting new people either at happy hour, ice cream socials, breakfast or dinner. One of the local RV Dealerships have had new models of Holiday Ramblers here on display for all of us, Dave and I were thinking about trading in our 2006 Endeaver for a 2007 Scepter 42 footer, want to wait and see all the different kinds of other models on display at the Perry Rally. Probably won't do it because we don't want to have house payments again, plus ours only has 11,000 miles on it, it's fun to think about though. This afternoon we played bean bag baseball and the team I was on won, I had never played that before it was fun.
It started raining here yesterday and this afternoon the spring on our awning for our slide broke. Dave had to drive down to the Monaco rally and find the awning company to come to where our rig is to fix it. The guy got here but doesn't have the stuff to fix it here so hopefully when we are at the Perry rally he can do the work there. He had to remove the awning so we can pull our slide in for the caravan tomorrow. We were told at the caravan meeting this morning that we will have a police escort to get us all on the freeway together then we have to leave about a 2 motorhome gap between each motorhome for on coming cars on the on ramps. I guess when we get to the other end we will get some other kind of escort to loop us all around the outside of town so we don't mess up the middle of town with the thousands of motorhomes showing up. Our time to go into the fairgrounds is 8:30 a.m., everyone has time slots and it goes on all day and night, it should be fun to see.
Tonight is the last happy hour and cowboy meal, and it's western wear contest. Dave and I went and got cowboy shirts, and hats. I also got a levi skort and western belt, we never did have any luck finding cheap cowboy boots. You know cowboy shit is expense, especially boots, so luckily we found cheap hats and clothes.
That's it for now, will write again once we are at the FMCA Rally.

March 14, 2007 we are still here in Macon Georgia at the Rally. So far we have had an enjoyable time. There are only about 58 coaches and really nothing of any seminars but we are having a good time. Dave is too in between his business phone calls. Monday we met with people that are parked in our area and at 5:30 it turned into Happy hour and munchies then a group of us went out to dinner to a place called "Pig in a Pit". Not that great of dinner but afterward we stopped at Dairy Queen for desert, it was fun. Tuesday was registration day and hang around watching all the coaches arriving, I took off to Wal-mart to have my nails done. Tuesday night at 5 the rally had Happy hour then they had hot dogs and all the fixins for dinner. Today was breakfast between 8 and 9 then a seminar on holding tanks, motor home insurance, and cleaning supplies for the motor homes. 1:30 was ice cream floats then game time, today was washer toss tournament. At 5 it was margarita party then they served a Cajun dinner. After dinner they had a 50/50 drawing and Dave won, $104.00. After that was bingo but we didn't stick around, we went back to the coach, took Valley walking around and visited with people.
We have met a lot of really nice people here and Valley is having fun meeting all of their dogs. These rallies are so much nicer then going in trailer parks, it seems to me that these people have decent animals, not the attack and barking dogs, just really friendly with all the other dogs. I could probably live the rest of my life in a motor home if we kept going to rallies.

March 12, 2007 We left Stone Mountain yesterday morning and are now parked in Shrine Park Macon, Georgia. This is the Holiday Rambler International 15th FMCA Pre-Rally, next Saturday we will leave here at 7:30 a.m. and caravan to Perry, Georgia where the FMCA rally begins, at that rally there are suppose to be 7,000 rigs. I guess at this pre-rally we are only suppose to have 60 or so rigs. 2 years ago when they had the pre-rally here I guess it rained a lot and a bunch of the rigs got stuck here in the park, so people are too afraid to come back here again. At that time I think they had a few hundred and even the tow trucks that showed up to pull the rigs out got stuck too. We are suppose to have rain here Thursday, so will see what happens. Monaco is having a pre-rally, and Dave said we probably should have gone to that, but too late now, who knows we may end up having a good time with fewer rigs and people.
Bye for now

March 9, 2007 as you know, if you read the other blog, we are in Stone Mountain Georgia and I had said we are here the wrong time of year and only 3 things are open now. Well, we did the 3 open attractions yesterday, in between Dave's business calls. All 3 things we did were fun/interesting meaning "Ride the Ducks" was kind of fun and informative, the Museum and Plantation tour were very interesting.
We have had great weather but it says the rain is coming, bummer.

March 7, 2007 haven't written for 5 days, boy time flies by fast, now I have catching up to do again. I mentioned before that we were in Montgomery Alabama, while there we drove into town and took a trolley ride around which showed the highlights of what is there that they are famous for. We didn't get into town until 4 so we couldn't get off the trolley and go see anything because it was too late. Normally what you do is pay your $1.00 and you can get on and off the trolley all day long. (yes that was one dollar) We went by the State Capitol, Rosa Parks Library and Museum, Hank Williams Museum, Alabama Dept. of Archives and History, Civil Rights Memorial ect. next time in town we will have to do the all day thing.
Saturday morning, March 3 we got headed for Stone Mountain, Georgia which is a beautiful place right outside of Atlanta. If you get a chance look up their website stonemountainpark.com/campground you should see all the stuff they have to do here, the only thing is come the right time of year. Of course we aren't and all but 3 things are closed until near the end of March and we will be long gone by then. Valley and I are doing a lot of walking and stocking squirrels. We arrived on Saturday and once all set-up we drove into Atlanta and went shopping at Costco. On Sunday we drove back into Atlanta and did a tour of the "World of Coca'Cola" what a waste of money on that one. Then we walked thru the "Underground" in Atlanta which is a bunch of shops right underneath the highway then under that is Kenny's Alley which is the entertainment district at night. We were there during the day, David Jr. said we should really go at night because it is really the happening place but knowing us I know we won't make it. After that we walked over and did a tour of CNN, now that was worth the money. Monday, we hung around drove into Stone Mountain, the city, and did laundry. Last night we drove into Atlanta and had dinner with Dave's second cousin, Randy and his family. We had a very nice dinner and it was a great visit, the only thing is while driving back home I hit a dog, we don't know how bad because it took off running. I was only driving 20 mph, we had just left their house and I hit the brakes so hopefully it wasn't hurt too bad. Damn people that don't train their dogs not to run once they get out of the house, that dog ran so fast in front of the car, I was just sick over it and still am. When we got back to the coach all I did was hold onto Valley and thanked god that I had taken the time to train her.
Enough bad news, today it is 71 degrees and beautiful, and now I'm all caught up on my blog, so see ya!

March 2, 2007, we are now in Montgomery Alabama, we got lucky and didn't get hit by the tornado, but we did get hit with severe thunder storms in Mississippi. We just pulled in all our awnings and pulled in our slides and stuck it out. It maybe lasted 35 min. then we had heavy winds after that. Whene it stopped I went walking around with Valley and the trailer park from hell, that we were staying in was mostly under water. We were on a cement slab so we were OK but the ones that weren't, lets just say I'm sure glad I wouldn't have to walk up to their trailers and try and get in or out of the door. They would have been up to their ankles in water, I took some pictures.
The tornado did hit one place in Alabama but not in Montgomery, and right now it's almost 3 in the afternoon and the sky is nice and blue, clouds are spread out and only covers the sun once in a while. The new camp ground we are at is "The Woods RV Park and Campground", it's rocks and gravel and patches of grass but mostly the grass area is under water because of yesterday. So much better then the last park though, not a lot of people that live here and do inbreeding. Very large area, a lot of open sites, right now, and it has a lake but not too nice of one, but that's OK because we are away from Martin Lake.
Tomorrow we are headed for Stone Mountain Georgia, we will be in Georgia for about 3 weeks I think, then will have to let you know where we go after that.
Bye for now.

I just went and looked at the pictures Dave posted in our website and noticed all the comments I had written on the pictures weren't carried over to the website. Just to let you know the last pictures of the trailers with all the trash around them is where we are at right now, I took the pictures while I was walking Valley around and holding the camera to my side so no one would see me take them. I must say right now the sky is booming very loudly and rain is really starting to come down, not a happy camper. I don't think I've ever heard thunder this loud before in my life.

March 1, 2007 part 3, and final chapter of the Katrina blog. Well, like I said earlier, we are here in Biloxi Mississippi and they had a lot of destruction here too. We drove to where the casinos are, which are right on the water, and that area has really been wiped out. Now in New Orleans what destroyed those areas where the levies, but in Biloxi it was the actual hurricane that destroyed it because it is right on the water
Anyway, the casinos, businesses, and houses were really destroyed here. The one good thing here though is everyone is working on rebuilding everything. Neighborhoods, businesses and the casinos are all under construction, they aren’t sitting around waiting for the government to rebuild. We got pictures posted on our website now, take a look see altonsystems.com
Right now we are under tornado watch, which isn’t making us too happy. I wanted out of this trailer park we are in because the people that live here I swear are all inbred, they really give me the creeps. Needless to say we are stuck here until tomorrow; they say the tornado should be gone by then. Just heard on the news that the tornado hit down in Alabama and that’s where we were headed, good thing we didn’t leave yet.
I’ll write later and let you know if we survive this.