Prairie Creek Campground - Benton, Alabama

SUN!!!   Finally blue sky.....beer tastes so much better like this!


Man can it rain in the south! It’s been 5 days since we’ve seen the sun and boy has it been nice to dry out. It’s now perfect, warm, spring weather, enjoying every minute!

We’ve been at this campground in rural Alabama (Closest big city is Montgomery) for 6 days. It’s on the Alabama lake and river system. We figured we might as well stay put since it was raining all over southern Alabama and it’s March break. This campground was almost booked solid, lots of families from Alabama vacationing here and it was likely the same any other campground. We also like the fact that although the campground was on the water, it wasn’t likely to flood, the sites were high and dry. Apparently one campground down the road from us did get flooded out...like I said, lots and lots of rain.

The biking around here has been perfect. Lots of long, flat, rural roads that have very little traffic, exactly what we needed to start one in order to get the bike legs and bike butt back. Lots of swampy areas...the spanish moss is in the trees everywhere around here, Dave keeps looking up expecting to see snakes hanging up there.

Speaking of snakes, there are apparently water moccasins here....a baby one trapped a lady in the laundry area for 2 hours on one of the rainy days before someone rescued her and killed it. I was talking to her daughter about it the next day and she said that her Mom thought it was a big worm (night crawlers were out everywhere with the rain) until it started to strike at her. They figured it was attracted to the heat from laundry room.....needed somewhere to get warm and out of the rain. I was told the small ones are more venomous than the big ones...great! So all the worms I stepped on during the middle of the nightly trip out to pee could have been snakes...fantastic! I’ve been walking around the campground much more carefully after finding that out. Some one else told us that Alabama has the most poisonous snakes of any state!!

Gator’s are also in this lake so needless to say, no swimming going on here. Would be nice to see one in the wild though. Dave’s always on the lookout.

Oh ya, a word about POLLEN, you know, that yellow sticky stuff that comes from tree sex? It’s everywhere! We were constantly wiping off what we thought was strange, yellow dust from the campground off of everything until someone clued us into the fact it’s pollen. All the trees are coming out at the same time and you could actually see yellow clouds of it in the air. What I don’t understand is why my allergies weren’t out of control. I’m supposedly allergic to oak tree pollen (which was what most of the trees were) but I had almost no reaction to it other than feeling like you were choking on it because it’s always in your throat. The picture I have in the album of the truck coated in it is about 3 days accumulation. Never been spring camping in Canada so we’ve got nothing to compare this to.

Happy to report southern hospitality is very much alive and well. We’ve had EXCELLENT service at any restaurant, store and hotel we’ve dealt with. Fellow campers have provided us with firewood, brochures and advice about other campgrounds to stay at in Alabama and Florida. Special thanks to Bob and Shirley and Nancy and Tom (all from northern Michigan) who made our stay at this park so enjoyable! Y’all were so helpful!

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