January 11th - Travel Day

Saturday we left Perryville at 4:00 a.m. for the ten hour drive to Gulf Shores. It stormed all night and luckily I woke up at 1:00  a.m. to discover that the electric was off. I got my cell phone and set the alarm on it. When we left the house the electric had still not come on. Upon driving out of the subdivision we realized why. A tree near the entrance to the subdivision had fallen on an electric pole and broken it. There were at least four Citizens Electric trucks out there and I saw one lineman installing hardware on a new pole.

We met Carlene and John at Rhodes, got a cup of coffee, and headed down I-55 in the pouring rain. The further south we got, the harder it rained. It isn’t fun driving in the dark in the pouring rain, especially when you have to pass 18 wheelers throwing lots of spray. At one point we drove by a tractor trailer laid over on its side in the median with its lights on. It must have just been blown over because there were no skid marks, no median damage around, an no emergency personnel on the scene yet. Scary.

In Mississippi, South of Memphis, traffic stopped all of a sudden without warning. Just ahead crews were working at getting Pine trees off the highway. It had to be a tornado a couple of miles wide looking at the twisted off trees as we drove through. Here are a couple of pictures. The first picture is the driving lane. The passing lane was open but we had to drive over a lot of small branches.

If we had come by earlier we wouldn’t have been able to get through. 

About a hour from our condo we stopped for lunch at Felix’s Fish Camp. 

It didn’t look like a place you would want to stop and eat but Carlene and John had been there numerous times and said the food was great. They were right. Here is a picture of what we ordered.

We arrived at the condo at about 3:00 p.m. and unloaded our stuff. A nice place. Our condo is on the ninth (top) floor. Here are pictures of the view off our balcony. We have never stayed in a beach front place before. I’m looking forward to sitting out there and drinking my coffee as the sun comes up (even if totally cloudy as predicted).

The surf was really rolling. John said this was not normal. The  thunder storms were obviously  churning things up.

It was a long day and after a night cap we turned in early so we will be fresh to explore the area tomorrow.