New Years, a Beginning

Nephew Blake preparing meal in Costa Rica.

After languishing for past 3 weeks in the "barn", the Admiral has once again entered the waters to voyage. After experiencing many weeks and months travelling our beloved Admiral, idleness tried the patience. Fortunately, our land bound home has returned to normal after exciting Christmas Holiday and the welcome visit of all our daughters (4) and two sons.

We bid Ade to Justin as he departed back to Hattiesburg, MS in continued preparation for deployment to Iraqi with the US Army. Our prayers and best wishes go with him in this risky adventure.

Our routine is to vacate the homestead each Thursday or Friday for travel in the Admiral to new and exciting locals within a short drive of our home. As we continue to search for new location, we are continually surprised to find adventures close to home. Our hope is to explore the Land Between the Lakes (LBL) during the winter months. After viewing the wonders of Yellowstone in the winter, we want to experience similar months in our home state. LBL is within 1-2 hours drive, depending on the site and offers eagle viewing, off road adventures and miles of hiking trails. Thus, we are awaiting answers from inquiries to the management for locations suitable for our Admiral during the winter. We realize developed sites are closed for the winter, however, many primitive or undeveloped sites exist. We only need to clarify permission to camp.

We have not experienced true dry camping but with the use of our generator, feel we can be comfortable, safe and enjoy the solitude. I suspicion we will enjoy undeveloped camping and discover a new dimension to our travels. We have not relished boondocking in parking lots, but understand the ease when just traveling to a new destination. I believe we will feel just as secure in a wooded, quiet site as in a busy parking lot. It does appear more and more business operations are prohibiting overnight stays. Understandable on some levels, but boondockers tend to spend considerable sums in businesses along these asphalt campgrounds.

No matter the results on our inquiries, we will have new experiences along the trails, roads and byways of this country. I have discovered with the help of LBL that we may camp in four (4) campgrounds throughout the winter months. They typically do not offer any facilities with the exception of the Fenton Camp, which offers water and electric. The LBL contact via their web site was quite helpful in pointing us toward winter campgrounds. This will be our winter beginnings of 2010 with hopefully new camping and travel experiences.

Happy Trails for 2010!