A week ago, we left Tuscaloosa, AL, and had a few days to get to Florida. Our reservations at a large Florida RV park started on Friday, so we had 4 days to get there – and had to take 4 days to get there as the park is notoriously booked up. Monday we did Horseshoe Bend National Park, and Tuesday we made it into Georgia.
While we had a destination in Georgia in mind, we did have 2 extra days where we didn’t have anything planned. As we were driving through Columbus, Georgia, we drove right past this ship…
Which had a sign on it saying it was the Civil War Naval Museum. By the time I looked it up online, and called for a little more info, we were 20 miles past, but we turned this convoy around and went back after the lady on the phone said that our museum membership would get us in half price. 🙂 When we got there, we found out reciprocal membership discounts are only good on ONE ticket. hmmph. We still went to the museum – after all, we had come all this way back!
It was a very quiet day at the museum – there were only a few other cars in the parking lot.
Inside the museum, there are the remains of an ironclad, much like the Cairo at Vicksburg National Military Park. Only this ironclad belonged to the southerners…
Outside, you can tour that ship that greets you on your way through town. It’s named the Water Witch, and you can walk the deck…
Caleb was most interested in all those ropes!!!
The kids really wanted to climb the mast, but we figured that was pretty taboo…
Caleb is loving being outside again after so many rain days; he couldn’t be slowed for a picture…
Inside, we watched a short film on one of the ships, and looked at all sorts of naval displays…
This is the rear of the ironclad. It’s pretty incredible when you realize that the framework that you look at, and the propellors attached, were fashioned around/over 150 years ago! It is remarkable, when you think of all that this wood and metal has been through, that any of it even exists today…
The skeleton of yet another Civil War battleship…
One of my favorite parts of this museum was the 3 large painting that hung on one of the walls. Each painting depicted a different naval scene…
I have never been a painting person, in fact, I HATE art museums 😉 , but I did really like these ones, as did the rest of the family. (We also loved the cyclorama at Gettysburg!)
At the end of the museum tour, there is a room with a partial mock ironclad that you can go inside…
this room was really neat – it looked so real. When you walk into the ironclad, the cut-away section that you walk through is made like the ironclads were so that you can get an idea of how fortified they were and how much it must have taken to destroy one. The outside 2 layers, under Daniel’s hand, are iron…
In the museum is another section of a ship that you can walk through to get an idea of what it was like onboard…
We took about 3 hours to tour the museum, after which we ate lunch outside at the RV (really late, we don’t do those time changes well, and we lost an hour driving into Georgia). After the museum, we split up: Vaughn headed down the road to our Walmart date for the night, and Eli chauffered us around to some of the MANY tactical stores in Columbus (home of Fort Benning). They didn’t find much, but Eli did find a new color of paracord that he bought 300 feet of, and they had a great time looking! After that, we followed Vaughn’s tracks down to quiet, little, Americus, Georgia (or what we thought would be quiet anyway…).
Our crazy time in Georgia (post to come) seems so long ago as we are now safely in that large RV park in Florida! We pulled in Friday as per our reservations, and while we have reses for 10 days, we were only going to stay for 2 to recoup from so many Wallydocking nights in a row! When we move every day, especially when we overnight at Walmarts or Cracker Barrels and the slides don’t all get put out and we don’t have elecricity for the vacuum unless we run the generator, the RV gets trashed pretty quickly and it takes us 2 days to clean up and rest up! We were just going to stay for a couple of days to clean house, dump tanks and refill, organize, grocery shop, plug in, do laundry, fumigate the van…; quickly recharge, if you will (literally and figuratively), before our next adventure of 2 weeks of boondocking in southern Florida. We got all cleaned up (which lasts all of 10 minutes – we do travel with 10 kids), and the laundry caught up (which doesn’t last even 10 minutes – by the time I get back to the RV with the clean clothes, there are already more dirty ones in the hampers!), but we are still here.
We were going to pull out bright and early on Monday, but Monday night, and now Tuesday, find us still here. When we got to the park, there were 5 boxes here waiting for us; several items that I had ordered, like a case of diapers, a pair of shoes for Caleb, a case of Axis and Allies miniatures that the boys ordered…in fact, they sent us out with our mail on a handtruck even though 2 of us went in for the mail! hehehe! One of those was a box of mail that Greg forwarded for us, including some year-end paperwork for Vaughn’s construction business.
Once I get those 1099misc’s in the mail, they weigh heavy on me knowing that I have to get those taxes done (I hate deadlines, even if they are 3 months down the road! LOL!). I knew that I couldn’t enjoy our other stops in Florida until those taxes were (are) done, (and you know how a momma’s attitude affects the whole family) so we are still here in the same park; thank goodness we had reses for 10 days! The kids are having fun swimming, and playing ping pong, air hockey, and pickleball, and tennis. I have taken over the little slide, and my post for the last 2 days has been at the dinette, with 2 laptops in front of me – one for the books, and the other to input taxes on (I miss the days of being able to whip out the taxes in 20 minutes and being able to buy the cheap TurboTax!LOL!). While I did make a quick run to Costco this morning (which ended up not being so quick because I took V’s new Garmin and she took some bizarre scenic route home, which I didn’t know how to change so just followed), I have spent the rest of the time wrapping up this paperwork. I am hoping to get it done today or tomorrow, but have found that I am missing a whole manila envelope of bank statements and receipts, including cash receipts. The bank statements aren’t such a big deal as I can download them from our online banking, and have, but I am still missing some info that was on the original copies and not referenced on the downloaded statements – my bank is going to love it when I have to call for clarification on some items from the beginning part of last summer! LOL! All I can think of is that I accidentally took a 2012 envelope to storage when I took 2011’s paperwork out of the RV; one can only store so much under the bed!!! It’s not like I can just run back to storage now, root around and find that envelope! Well, I suppose that I COULD, but it’s 2542 miles between here and ‘home’ – per google map. Not happening… So, I’m muddling through paperwork (which was much easier to keep in check in the sticks n’ bricks), the kids are enjoying the park amenities, and we all are enjoying the beautiful Florida sunshine!
Good and bad, it’s all in the life of the nomad, I guess. 😀
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