Evacuation from Irma Part 2

We woke up about 6AM at the rest stop.  It wasn't daylight yet and I did not want to overstay our welcome.  I shut down the generator and I did a poor job of stowing away all of the loose stuff.  We got back on I-75 amid crashes and bangs of stuff falling over or shifting around in the camper.   I was still very tired and feeling bad.  I was also having trouble driving.  Not from falling asleep but just trying to steer the camper and keeping it straight on the road while things slid and banged around in the camper.

I asked Linda to find a campground nearby so we could stop.  I needed to rest and recover from the night before.  We stopped at Seminole Campground in Fort Meyers, Florida.  We arrived at 8am a full hour before opening time. In spite of this one of the employees saw us and let us check in early.  I was fully prepared to wait the hour I was exhausted.   We easily checked in, another employee guided me into the site.  He was careful of the nearby trees and to make sure I did not run over the sewer hookups.  We spent the day resting and shopping for supplies.  We stopped a a local grocery store and they were completely sold out of water.  The only bread left was potato bread.  Fortunately we like potato bread.  We spent the night and tried out the stove.  I reloaded the car since we used it to travel around Fort Meyers.  We didn't find a spare for the tow dolly.  Tractor Supply and WalMart were both sold out of the correct size.

I dumped the tanks the night before only to learn later that I did it wrong.  We got back on the road and continued north.  All along the way we would encounter slow downs where our speed dropped to the 10s and 20s.  We would speed up again for a time and then slow to a crawl.  I found a service station and the wait for a pump was only about 30 minutes.  There was other open pumps I just could not attempt to reach them while towing the car.  Still no bottled water in the stores.  I did find bottled water at the rest stop vending machines.  We finally reached I-10 east of Tallahassee late in the evening.  We spent the night at the Suwannee Campground and headed west in the morning.  The rest of our trip was uneventful except for a problem in an Alabama service station.  A guy parked his car at a pump blocking our access for 30 minutes.  We were blocking the driveway waiting for him on move.  Turns out he went in the store bought lunch and stayed in the store to eat it.  In spite of pages and employees searching for the guy he returned to his car totally oblivious to the problems he was causing.

We made it home late Friday night safe and sound and Hurricane Irma arrived in Florida on Sunday.