Monday, December 17, 2007 - Foscue Creek Park, Demopolis AL
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Sunrise at Site 42, Foscue Creek Park, Demopolis AL, December 17, 2007 (Brrrr - open the door & shoot)
It sure is nice not having to deal with the snow and ice I escaped this winter.
I wondered why the great little Titan Ceramic Heater with Thermostat #TCM16W-U I picked up at Wal-Mart a couple of weeks ago was having a hard time keeping the temperature up in here. When I was looking for a ceramic heater to use instead of propane when I'm hooked up to shore power this one was recommended to me by a friend who has used a couple of them for supplemental heat for his house for years. It's great but won't heat the RV all by itself at 25 degrees so when I got up this morning I supplemented it with my Olympian Wave 6 catalytic heater. Now we're nice and toasty warm.
One of these days I need to figure out what is causing shore power to interfere with the Kyocera KR1 Mobile EVDO WiFi Router I use with a Verizon USB720 USB EVDO Rev A modem for broadband access. To get get the WiFi working I have to shut off shore power and run it off the house batteries. What a pain. For the period I'm online I'm without my ceramic heater and my laptop recharging brick. I end up running 2 hours online followed by 2 hours off line to recharge the laptop. There is a caution in the KR1 manual about setting it up too near a microwave oven or some other source that dirties the power. Maybe it's the old power converter that is causing my problem. I removed the microwave oven before I left on this trip so it can't be that.
Night camp
Site 42 - Foscue Creek Campground, Demopolis AL
- This is a well maintained US Army Corps of Engineers campground with level paved sites, most with full hookups
- Many sites overlook the water of the inlets off Demopolis Lake on the Tombigbee River
- There is good biking on the park roads
- The campground is pretty full Thanksgiving week and is generally booked solid the weekend of the Demopolis Christmas on the River festival in early December.
- Poor Verizon cell phone service - access is via Extended Network, roaming
- No Verizon EVDO service - access is via the Extended Network and service varies is slow but reliable
- Only 3 miles to Wal-Mart and other services in Demopolis AL
- Find other references to Foscue Creek
- List the nights I've camped here
- Check the weather
- Reserve a site
- Get a map
Wind on the Gangplank
There was almost no soil in that part of the range - just twelve miles' breadth of rough pink rock. "As you go from Chicago west, soil diminishes in thickness and fertility, and when you get to the gangplank and up here on top of the Laramie Range there is virtually none," Love said. "It's had ten million years to develop, and there's none. Why? Wind - that's why. The wind blows away everything smaller than gravel."
Standing in that wind was like standing in river rapids. It was a wind embellished with gusts, but, over all, it was primordially steady: a consistent southwest wind, which had been blowing that way not just through human history but in every age since the creation of the mountains - a record written clearly in wind - scored rock. Trees were widely scattered up there and, where they existed, appeared to be rooted in the rock itself. Their crowns looked like umbrellas that had been turned inside out and were streaming off the trunks downwind. "Wind erosion has tremendous significance in this part of the Rocky Mountain region," Love said, "Even down in Laramie, the trees are tilted. Old-timers used to say that a Wyoming wind gauge was an anvil on a length of chain. When the land was surveyed, the surveyors couldn't keep their tripods steady. They had to work by night or near sunrise. People went insane because of the wind." His mother, in her 1905 journal, said that Old Hanley, passing by the Twin Creek school, would disrupt lessons by making some excuse to step inside and light his pipe. She also described a man who was evidently losing to the wind his struggle to build a cabin: