Gunter Hill Campground West of Montgomery, Alabama

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

We pulled out of our site in Panama City Beach, Florida, dumped our tanks, and headed toward Montgomery, Alabama.  Our route would take us more than two hundred miles on all two lane highways, except for a two mile stretch on Interstate 65 just south of Montgomery, Alabama. It's nice seeing the back country, it's Spring here, and the roads were in good shape.  But, after a few hours, we began to wonder if Alabama had any four lane roads!

Gunter Hill is another COE campground located about 8 miles west of Montgomery on Woodruff Lake. This lake was made by the COE and covers 20 square miles. We had reserved site #99 for the next two weeks.  This site had water and electric hook ups, but no sewer. However, it was right on Lake Woodruff and this section of the campground is heavily covered in trees. An awning is not necessary here, which is fine because a tree was in the way and we couldn't get the awning out anyway.

This is a view of the Lake from our site.

 This is the view looking out of our rear window. Several fishing  boats stopped and fished at this very spot. One boat was here the second morning and one of the guys in the boat took out a gun and shot at    something on the shore just below our camper.  We assumed it was a snake.  But, that incident didn't give us a warm and fuzzy feeling either.

The weather forecast was calling for sever thunderstorms with possible wind sheer.  Our weather radio was on the blink, so we ran into Prattville (just north of Montgomery) to find a new one.  Prattville is loaded with all kinds of stores that had Kitty's head spinning as we drove down the main drag to the Bass Pro Shop.

We found the radio we wanted and began to check out of the store.  The clerk told us that the schools were getting out early due to the severe weather forecasted for the afternoon and evening.  She also said this area is not in tornado alley, but has a lot of tornadoes.  This was our second non-warm and fuzzy feeling today and it's only mid morning!

We grab our stuff and headed to the grocery store to pick up a few vital vittles, and beat feet back to camp before the storm hit.  The sky was getting darker and we managed to get the new weather radio set up and waited to see what would happen next.  Within minutes, the radio set out its shrill warning of the impending thunderstorm and rain began falling.  The rain got heavier and the sky grew darker.  Rain was pelting our roof so hard we couldn't hear ourselves think.  Then, the weather radio let out another shrill warning for tornadoes in our area!

The rain continued for several hours alternating between heavy and light.  Fortunately, we did not experience any high winds or tornadoes. But, we began thinking that a site with all these trees may not be such a good idea.  Also, we could not see any of the other campers in this area and that made Kitty feel very uneasy.  We decided to see if we could find a better site in the morning.  Hopefully, we find something here we like.