We're Back from Alabama!

We’re back! We finally made it down to Gulf Shores Alabama to visit “The Little Zoo that Could” aka Alabama Gulf Coast Zoo. If you watched the series about it on Animal Planet then you know what I’m talking about, if you didn’t…boy you missed it! It’s an awesome little zoo and my daughter has been in love with it, the animals, and the employees since she watched that 13 week series! Needless, to say it was one of the MUST accomplish things on our list before we leave for England. And now that we can check that off our list we’ve come to the realization that we only have 4 months left in this house! YIKES!!! Time to get busy around here! Realization as set in! However, before we run off and get to extremely busy I’m going to spend the next week telling you about our trip & the reason I’m breaking it up is so you don’t have to read a giant book all in ONE day! Say “Thank You” you know you want too…

Okay so we left Saturday and drove to somewhere in Tennessee just shy of the Alabama state line. The drive was pretty okay, except for the fact that about the time we were ready to stop we got stuck in traffic for like 2 hours! The kids hated it, it was raining off and on, and no-body was moving. We knew there had to be a bad accident. I tried to explain that we need to have patience because here we are sitting nice and healthy and un-hurt, when some-one up ahead of us could be hurt really badly. When we finally got to move forward and head on out we were able to see and I wish Ashlynn would have still been awake then she might have understood what I meant by being patient and praying for whomever was in the accident. A tow truck brought a green car past us and the whole front-end of it was smashed in. Then when we got up to the accident sight – oh my goodness – all you could do was pray. I don’t know which vehicle was at fault, but one of them hit the rock on the side of the road. You know how some highways have cliffs of rocks along the sides? Well, that’s what it was. There was a semi truck and his trailer was in one lane and had busted open, you could see boxes of stuff everywhere. His cab was on the other side of the highway in the ditch! Totally detached from the trailer itself. Like I said, all you could do was pray. After that we continued our search for a hotel, thankfully finding one and it only had 3 rooms left! All the hotels in the area were full or booked, due to all sorts of stuff – not to mention the amount of traffic coming off I-65.

Sunday, we continued on toward Gulf Shores and it started getting warm – thank heavens! We saw no major accidents and thankfully we did not have to sit in traffic anywhere. We stopped at several rest areas for my husband & kids to track down some geo-caches (their addicted!). I think they successfully found one in every state we drove through. Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida. Crazy uh? It started getting a bit more difficult once we crossed in to Alabama…cause 20 minutes across that state-line and David was sneezing like crazy! Says he is allergic to Alabama!!! We finally made it to our resort, got settled in a bit. Actually, I wasn’t feeling well…oh I so forgot to tell you I left Ohio…SICK! I’d been telling all my friends for 2 weeks that my family was not getting that bug that was going around, we just weren’t having it…we were going on vacation and NO-BODY was going to be sick! Sadly, Friday evening before leaving the next morning I wasn’t feeling too hot. I was tired, my head hurt, my nose was running, and to top it off after I went to get some travel supplies and snacks…I stopped by my friend Jenny’s to drop a house key off so she could take care of Lily for us and I locked myself out of my car!!! So I had to stand out in the cold and wait for David to come unlock the car so I could drive home…needless to say…I was off to a rough start!

Back to Sunday…David and the kids went to get pizza and stuff and I took a bath and tried to relax a little and get to feeling better. I’m sure walking out to the beach that evening in the cool wind did not help matters much…but I couldn’t stay locked up in the resort now could I?

Monday’s information will be posted later today….don’t want you to have to read to much all at once or look at 400 pictures! haha

~T~