Monday, April 8, 2024:
Spending the night at: Chewalla Lake Recreation Area Campground near Holly Springs Mississippi
$18.00 for Site 41 on the driver’s side has 30 amp power and water, about 60’ long and very wide, but slopes to the passenger side. We’re only staying one night, so not unloading Kawi. That could create a problem with our auto leveling system in Nitro. It does not like to level itself on uneven ground with the weight of Kawi inside. Site 42 probably would have been better.
Weather- mostly cloudy and muggy with a solar eclipse at about 1:20pm: Hi 77, low 58, Humidity Hi 99%, low 68 – too muggy for sleeping with the windows open, and it’s gonna rain.
It was about a 230 mile day and we had to go through Birmingham AL, which surprisingly was not awful. We’ve found through our travels that roads in and near cities are usually pretty crappy, and this was no exception. But the traffic was not bad, so that was a nice surprise, and the freeway (I-65) does not go right through the middle of downtown. We turned onto I-22 and headed more west toward Memphis.
I got to looking at the weather forecasts for where we’re staying tonight near Holly Springs, and where we’re headed tomorrow near Russellville. Rain. Rain. Rain. Frowny face.
Booooo! I guess the good thing is that it isn’t 100% for three days, right?
Here was our route today, making our way northwest.
We arrived at Chewalla Lake Recreation Area without anything exciting happening, which is good. It is quite a large park in the Holly Springs National Forest. There are only a few sites that will accommodate a trailer, and I made our reservation a month or so ago. Most of the property is for day use, picnicing, and there is a boat launch. Kenny talked to the campground host who said that the park was closed for several years and became a place of drugs, garbage and misuse. When the Forest Service decided to reopen the area, there were several dozen trees down and a lot of clean up was needed.
We found our spot and discovered that we are almost the only ones here. Kinda weird. Our spot is nice and big which I was really happy t0 find when I was looking for a spot. But unfortunately there is a a side-to-side slope of maybe five inches. That doesn’t sound like much, but it makes things really rough for Nitro. Kawi weighs over 2,ooo pounds, and our leveling system with him inside does not like to work properly when we’re out of level that much.
We tried to level it once, and it was not successful. We got the front feet down, pulled Henry out from under and knew that the front of Nitro needed to come way down. But when Kenny set the leveling system in motion, it lifted the front even higher, WHAT?! and then only put one of the rear feet down. UhOh. Kenny tried to lower the front manually, and only the passenger front foot responded which actually lifted that foot up off of the ground so then we had the driver front foot and the passenger rear foot down. EEK! That ain’t right, Matilda!
Kenny was able to get Henry back under Nitro and set it back down onto the 5th wheel mount so that he could raise all of the feet back up and start over. But first he moved Nitro a bit and drove the passenger side up onto a couple of 2x8s to raise it up some. (Shhhh – that was my suggestion initially, but he declined the idea the first go-round.). However, I’m not sure that it helped even this time.
He was able to get the front feet down, pull Henry out from under, and lower the front of Nitro. But when he tried to put the back feet down, only the passenger side came down again. Dang it. The driver’s side rear foot didn’t come down, and if they don’t both come down, then the two center stabilizing ones won’t come down either. Oh well – this is the best we could get it to do. At least it’s only for one night and we’re level enough for the fridge and everything to work properly.
All the time we were doing this was when the solar eclipse was happening. We had some breaks in the clouds but couldn’t have seen the eclipse even if we had the right eyewear to look. But we did notice the daylight got kind of a golden-yellow and the color of everything seemed like the sun was shining through smoke. Ah ha! Maybe trailer leveling systems don’t work during solar eclipses. We should have read the warning labels more closely and waited an hour.
We had a bit of rain, but then it let up for awhile so I went for a stroll around the park. There’s really a lot of day use area.
This was a pretty spot.
Ah ha! I found a dogwood when we weren’t driving by in motion so that I could take a picture. I like how they bloom before the rest of the trees get really leafy, so that you can see them easier. I noticed a lot of them as we were driving along the freeway – areas of pretty white flowery trees among the tall tree trunks.
It started to sprinkle so back home to hide from the rain, which continued off and on for the rest of the day. We just hung out inside, snoozed, and had french dip samiches for dinner. There wasn’t much TV reception here but there was enough cell signal that we could hotspot to one of our phones to watch some shows on Amazon. Tomorrow isn’t going to be a fun day.