Sweet Home Alabama

   Sweet Home Alabama. Well it’s not exactly home but it’s where we are living right now while the rest of the country is in a deep freeze.

   Our time spent in Asheville was quite nice spending time with friends and family over the holidays but with freezing temperatures most of the time that we were there, it wasn’t a lot of fun dealing with things like frozen pipes. These RV’s aren’t really made for cold weather living, but we survived the 7 weeks that we were there.

   When we left Asheville, we made a three day stop in Nashville, TN and spent New Years with some friends and then headed south to the gulf coast to get out of all things frozen.

   Since I do all of the driving, I wanted to stop and rest for a while. I  figured that south Alabama would be a good place to do that. Our home for he next several months is the Magnolia Springs Golf and RV Resort just north of Gulf Shores Alabama. We’ve already been here two weeks and I’m finally sitting down to blog for the first time in months.
   In the time that we have been here, the weather has bounced around quite a bit. It got down to 26 and 27 two consecutive nights but was in the mid forties during the day. Today was really nice, Deb and I took Molly down to the beach and walked for about an hour. I was hot and sweaty by the time we got back to the truck. I guess 65 degrees and bright sunshine will do that to a person. It’s pretty weird walking on the beach here, everybody is from Wisconsin.

   The first weekend that we got here I went out knocking on doors to gain permission to hunt. I talked to nine landowners and got permission from seven of them. It seems that there are a lot of wild pigs in this area and they are causing a lot of property damage. I was told that they are very difficult to hunt and if you put a little pressure on them, they simply leave the area and take up residence elsewhere.

   After about 4 hours of hunting, I had already seen about 30 and killed two. Yes, they are difficult to hunt because they live in the thickest nastiest brush that you ever want to see and just because you see them doesn’t mean that you will have an opportunity for a shot because the brush is thick and they don’t stop moving for more than a second or two.

   After killing two pigs, I thought that I would donate the meat to a local charity but I found out that there are no local donation programs available for pork. They will take all the venison you can give them but no pork. Since the area has a pig problem, you would think that they could solve two problems at the same time by making it easy to donate pork to the needy.

Not only could I not find a donation program, I then spent several hours figuring out that there weren’t any pork processors here either. I found out that the State of Alabama quit allowing people who cut up deer to do pigs anymore. I’m sure that they had a reason but it sure seems counterproductive to me. I had to drive 50 miles to a processor in Florida to have my pigs cut up. I’m sending the meat home so it’s waiting for us when we get there.

The next little piggy is going on a big smoker for a pig roast here at the RV park.