Kicking Back and Settling In

Yesterday morning, we took a drive down the main road that takes us to Foley and Gulf Shores. There are lots of shopping and eating opportunities along that road. And, there is also our Weight Watchers center to keep us mindful!

Our drive took us to the beach, and what a lovely beach it is. The sand is white and soft. It was quite windy and the waves were pretty high. But Dortha and I still walked the beach barefoot and got our feet wet in the Gulf of Mexico.

After our beach walk, we stopped at Walmart to pick up a few items and then came back home. We were looking forward to a quiet afternoon and nice dinner at home. But, Jim's computer had been giving him threat alerts for some time, and we were concerned that even though we couldn't find a virus, that something was going on. We had a phone consultation with Dortha's nephew, Ryan, who advised us to check to see if there were files waiting to be written to the cd, because the message we were getting gave us a file location on "D". Well, to make a long, complicated story shorter, it turned out that when we had his computer worked on by the Geek Squad in Rapid City, they left one of their super-duper cd's in his D drive. All is back to normal with that.

We had the opportunity later in the afternoon to briefly meet Randy and Terry, RV-Dreams family members who are staying here as well. They've been following our blogs and it was great to get to meet them! We will get together while we're here, for sure.

Since we'd made a trip to Best Buy in the afternoon, and Dortha's chicken hadn't thawed out, we decided to go out for dinner. We went to Applebees, which is Weight Watcher friendly, and then to TCBY for a yogurt soft serve. One more stop to browse a discount store and it was back home.

Today has been spent here at the plantation, visiting with Glenn & Sylvia and Dortha and Mark. We were all sitting here in the Castle this morning, when Mark mentioned he heard a noise that sounded like a mouse - in our ceiling! A little while later, we all heard the noise, which sounded like it was coming from the area around the kitchen slide out. Oh, no! They'd had a mouse in the ceiling of their Dutch Star and had been able to catch it with a sticky-trap by removing a light fixture, so we tried that, but there is no room to put a trap in the tiny hole under the light fixtures in our ceiling.

Suddenly, our guests decided they needed to get on with their day, and we were left to ponder our situation. Jim went to Foley to find some "real" mouse traps, since we haven't caught anything on the sticky traps we have in our storage compartments. He came back with six traps and has them set in various places. So far, no takers. I'm hoping what we heard was just a bird, as we had one yesterday who kept flying at the motor home and making noises that sounded similar to what we heard this morning. Stay tuned!

The major accomplishment today was making decisions about how long to stay here, and where to go next. We really love it here and have decided to stay until after the first of December. Then we'll make our way to the Dallas/Fort Worth area and stay there about a month before moving south. I think we have eliminated a visit to the Rio Grande Valley for this winter, due to time constraints and what we see as far as the costs of the places we might want to stay. So, the plan is to go to Rockport, Texas, for a little over a month before going to Kerrville, Texas on March 1.

I'm not a big fan of making definite plans or reservations, but because of the holidays and the fact that places tend to fill up in the south during the winter, we did make reservations at a couple of places.

Later this afternoon we took a walk. This is looking up "our" row - a very long one!

And we caught the sunset through the trees:

For dinner tonight, Dortha made a chicken stir fry with rice and I made a light peach cobbler, wonderful meal! Tomorrow is our weigh-in and then we'll see what the day has in store!