Monday, January 1, 2018, Move to Montgomery, AL

We continued our trek south towards warmer climes - Decatur, AL, while warmer than Lebanon, TN was still ridiculously cold. I pushed the button to retract the jacks, but the lights said they stayed down. Sure enough, one of the rear jacks was frozen to the ground. I could see it rose a few inches, but it was pulling the ground up with it. I decided to put the coach in gear and move it just a little bit to break it free. That almost worked - the jack retracted but with a chunk of ground about 2 feet in diameter and 4 inches thick. I hammered on the frozen chunk with a log to no avail. Finally, we broke out the heat gun. After a few minutes I gave the log another try and it finally separated from the jack pad. The 25-degree temperature and 10 mph wind made the ordeal much more grueling than it probably sounds.

Traffic was pretty light as we headed to a Kroger fuel center where groceries and gift cards purchased in December meant we could get $1.00 off each gallon of diesel. Unfortunately, that only applied to 35 gallons of the 105 gallons it took to fill our coach (their regular price was still pretty good at $2.499/gal).

With all of the extra issues, we still got a pretty early start and were thinking we could settle in our next stop by around 2:00. We were wrong - a ten-mile long traffic jam added another 2 hours to our travel time. Just after the traffic cleared we stopped in a rest area to let Sam stretch his legs. We saw what caused all of the delay -  not a pretty sight.

We checked into Gunter Hill COE Campground just outside of Montgomery, AL around 4:00. It turned out to be a pretty long day to chalk up another 172.6 miles (84,531.0 total). We settled in as quickly as we could and fired up the furnace. We clearly were not far enough south yet.

Sadly, the low was predicted to be 18. We won't be storing the heavy coats for a while yet. I'm sure hoping this arctic blast will pass soon!