Little Adventures

Not everything goes the way you expect them to and certainly not the way you planned.  But such is life on this blue-green planet.  Sometimes we push the edge of physics with the stuff we have invented.  This was our experience on Wednesday as we approached Red Bay.  We knew from having communicated with many other Tiffin owners that Camp Red Bay, aka The Tiffin Service Center, could easily be filled up and we would have to dry camp, aka boondock, when we arrived and got into the queue for service.  With this in mind I wanted to have a full fuel tank before beginning our boondock so we could run the A/C off the generator, aka genny.  On the way into town I found an old gas station/restaurant that serviced logging trucks and pulled into their two pump island and filled up.

On the way out our Rand McNally GPS device, aka Randy, gave us a bad U-turn set up that began to take us out of town on small, narrow country roads.  Thinking myself smarter than Randy, I looked and found a left U-turn I thought I could make.  I couldn’t.  I didn’t see a chain link fence that suddenly rose up to prevent me from completing my U-turn.  The back end of Phaeth and all of Hope were across the road. We had effectively stopped the flow of traffic.  Granted this was country traffic and we were blocking it nonetheless.  Thank God most country drivers appear to be accustomed to the encounters such as this and were very patient.  The residents of Red Bay and its environs probably have this problem on a regular basis as newbie motor home drivers make their way to the Mecca of Tiffin.

Remember that I can’t back up with Hope, aka a toad, connected to Phaeth so we had to jump out and disconnect in order for Phaeth to back up and get enough room to complete the turn.  However, because of the extreme angle, Hope was reluctant to detach and it must have been a funny sight of this old man sweating buckets, pushing and pulling a Jeep Wrangler Sport from its front bumper getting hotter and redder in the face as the radiator of a big diesel engine blew hot air down on him.  Luckily I remembered the tension release devises built into the towing arms and the reluctant arm let go.  Joanie jumped in Hope and put on the brake so it wouldn’t roll away.  (Maybe that is the grand finale that the audience was waiting for – watching the old man running down the road side trying to get his runaway Jeep.)  Well, sorry folks.  Within 30 seconds we had cleared the road and waved a quick thanks to a half dozen or so followers of our adventure.

I am learning the limitations of driving our house.