Snow and Ice

We decided to continue on this morning and go as far as we could before the weather got too bad.

It was gray and dry when we left Lake Seminole at 7:30 am EST. Two minutes later we entered the Central Time Zone and it was 6:30 AM. We headed west on I-10 with our first point of decision being Pensacola. The Florida Unit of Gulf Islands National Seashore is near there and there is a good campground at Fort Pickens.

It was still dry and gray when we arrived at the exit, so we decided to continue into Alabama where it started to rain. We stopped at the Alabama Welcome Center to check the weather and have breakfast. It looked like there was not escaping the weather coming our way, but we opted to drive on though Alabama.

It was a little dicey going over the long Mobile Bay causeway with a stiff crosswind on the wet roads and the weather got colder as we crossed the state, but it was still rain. It was starting to freeze at this point. The roads weren't freezing yet, but the rain was freezing when it hit the body and wiper blades on Speedy, building up a layer of ice.

When we reached Mississippi, we stopped at their welcome center to re-evaluate our efforts. The welcome center was closed and the idea of staying there for a day wasn't appealing. The Davis Bayou campground of the Gulf Islands NS was about 25 miles further, so we opted to go for that while the roads were still just wet. As we crossed the long causeway over the Pascagoula River, I could only think of the ubiquitous "Bridge Freezes Before Roadway" signs in the northeast. There weren't any here and it was a three-mile long bridge we were crossing.

We made it to Davis Bayou with no problems, found it more crowded than we expected, given our experience at Lake Seminole, but found a large open site in which to park Speedy and the trailer. The campground has electricity and water as well as a new building with heated restrooms and heated hot showers. We were here a couple of years ago, when it was just a foundation.

We have plugged in, turned on our electric heater, fired up the computers to catch up with mail and news, and watched the weather turn to custard. There is about a quarter inch of "snow" on the ground (more properly frozen rain) and it is forecast to get into the low 20s tonight. Not much by New England standards.

The weather is expected to clear before morning, but we probably won't get an early start as the temperature is not expected to get above freezing until nearly noon. They don't seem to do much with the roads here. I'll bet we won't see any salt on them.

We still have about 525 miles to Aransas, so even with a late start and short drive tomorrow we should make before the weekend.

No bird-of-the-day. We were hoping for a Brown Pelican as we crossed the causeways, as they are often gliding along there, but they wisely stayed home today.

A couple of photos