Huntsville, AL: No Blog Yesterday Courtesy of Bandwidth Police

We are in Huntsville, Alabama having left Marion, NC this morning around 11:30 am.

There was no Blog entry yesterday and here's the story. Early Saturday morning the owner of the campground where we were staying informed us we were Wi-Fi 'bandwidth hogs'.

Now, with the Harley, we have been called 'Wild Hogs', and we have been called 'Mild Hogs', but we have never been called 'Bandwidth Hogs', at least not that we know of....

So this was both something new and a surprise however upon reflection I realized I had downloaded & installed the new FireFox 3 browser on Friday afternoon; that download was 57 Mb. I had to download twice since it failed to install the first time. That accounted for 114Mb plus I downloaded a number of applets for FireFox 3.

In addition, MLA & I did our normal web surfing: e-mail, E-bay, the Blog and uploading pictures. So I figured the FireFox downloads had put too much of a strain on the campground's satellite system. Shouldn't have but it did.

Normally we use our own cellular Internet connection however there were no cell phone signals at this park so we used their Wi-Fi.

Long story short (too late for that, eh), MLA and I stayed off of the Internet for the rest of the day Saturday. When I went to do the Blog last night, we were no longer on the campground Wi-Fi system. Either our log-on expired (shouldn't have, we were paid through Sunday) or the campground owner disconnected us from the Wi-Fi. I can't imagine they would disconnect us without notifying us but those are the the two most likely options.

The new FireFox 3 runs very fast; I need to look at FireFox and see if its doing some type of anticipatory read-ahead. If so, that might account for some increased load however it shouldn't bring a satellite network connection to its knees.

In any case, no Blog. My apologies.

The drive to Huntsville took us around and through the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. The area near Black Mountain is incredibly beautiful. Then we ended up going through Nashville. The lakes, rivers and dams of Tennessee are huge and beautiful. I told MLA we should come back and stay in a few of the parks at a later date. Definitely worth investigating as a possible place to retire.

As I said, we are now just west of Huntsville. Tonight we will be our first overnight at a Walmart. We traveled until 8 pm, had dinner at Cracker Barrel, and then parked & did our shopping at a Walmart Super Center. We don't need a campground since we are out of here early tomorrow in order to get to Red Bay, AL. We are not camping; just parked long enough to get a few hoours rest and then -- c'ya.

Red Bay, Alabama is where our RV was manufactured and we have a couple of warranty items we thought we would get addressed since we are so close. While we are in Red Bay we should have a chance to explore the surrounding area. I hear there's not a lot to do in Red Bay however we'll let you know what we find.

Until then -- See Ya!