HEADING WEST - FIRST DAY ON THE ROAD

The weather was terrible our last night at home, only allowing us 3-4 hours of sleep between severe thunderstorms.  We are on the countywide weather alert notification by telephone anytime there is a severe storm in the area.  Needless to say, we were awakened twice during the night with these alerts.  Winds got up to 45-60mph, small hail, and lots of thunder and lightning.  When we pulled out of our driveway this morning, tree branches cluttered our front yard.  We crossed the Alabama border at 6:30AM EST and the radar shows rain for the entire trip.  

For the first 2 hours we drove primarily on 2 lane roads up US 431 in Alabama.  Once we got on I-20 W we were on 4 lane or interstate for the remainder of the day.  I-20 east of Birmingham has been rebuilt in the past few years.  It is a really good road now. 

The weather forecast was correct.  It rained hard all day.  It let up enough for us to give the dogs a good walk at lunch time when we stopped at the Mississippi Welcome Center.  Shiloh and Sugar did good today in the Moho.  This trip is already proven to be much more comfortable than last year's drive in the truck camper to Alaska despite the rain.

We saw a lot of areas that were flooded.  In Birmingham we saw cars underwater below us when we crossed a bridge over a roadway.  All the creeks were flooded.

We arrived at EZ Daze RV Park in Southaven, MS (adjacent to Memphis) around 4PM EST.  This is a nicely done RV park with concrete, level pads.  We didn't need to use our leveling jacks and didn't extend the slide since we are just here for an overnight stay.

 The wet roads contributed to large amounts of road spray which infiltrated some of the lower storage compartments of our Moho.  They dried out quickly once we opened them up and aired them out.

Tomorrow we will stay in Springfield, Missouri.