Monday, December 17, 2007 - Foscue Creek Park, Demopolis AL
< previous day | archives | next day >
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
Alex Can Think
Animal researchers are finally beginning to catch up to the little old ladies in tennis shoes who say Fifi the poodle can think. The fights are always between a big group of experts who think animals don't have a lot of feelings or aren't very smart, and a much smaller group of researchers who think there's a lot more going on inside an animal's head than we know. The really nasty fights always seem to go one way: it's always the animal "debunkers" who are on the attack. At least, I don't remember a single big academic fight where someone got fired or lost their funding for doing a study where the animal turned out to be dumber than people thought, and lots of studies like that have been done. Claiming that an animal can't do something isn't considered blasphemous.