After leaving Slidell, Louisiana we drove east through Mississippi and Alabama to Florida, stopping at the USS Alabama in Battleship Memorial Park, Mobile. This is a magnificent area and memorial site, and can only be ‘described’ by some of the photographs we took walking around. The battleship USS Alabama; World War II, Korean and Vietnam War equipment; Blackbird, a huge B52, and not least the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Later that day we entered Florida, the tag line on the sign is ‘Open for Business’ and they are not…

Once we finally got ‘Arvey loaded for what seemed to be a 12 month trip, but really only 7 weeks, we topped up the diesel at the Exxon across from the storage at NIRVC. Wonderful news – it let us use our Tom Thumb rewards card and we saved 20 cents a gallon – woohoo. We hooked up the CR-V at the gas station and set off to a truck stop at Canton. Even the low manual effort of loading and hooking up, with the heat, it made…