October 23, 2011

We decided to leave St. Louis on Saturday because Sunday there’s a big race that will close some of the major roads.  It was hard to leave - so many good people at the St. Louis RV Park, and we’ll miss them all.  But it’s time.

I noticed that I tend to write about sunshine and rainbows, grand vistas and great people.  All true, but this might give the impression that RVing is all fun and joy.  So to balance the reporting, here’s what happened yesterday.

We’d been on the road a few hours and it was getting dark outside but we wanted to make it to Lexington, KY before stopping. 

1. We started smelling something bad.  I checked the soles of our shoes (you never know what you will step in when you take the dogs outside) but found nothing.  So I started checking the rest of the RV and made a horrifying discovery - the black water tank was overflowing into the RV!!  RVers know exactly what that terrible phrase means, but for the others, just picture a full toilet overflowing.  Very Bad News!  Randy pulled over right away and stopped the mess while I cleaned it up as best I could, but that’s a major cleanup job that can’t be handled ad-hoc, so after doing the best I could with two rolls of paper towels and a bunch of cleaning rags, we had no choice but to hit the road again. 
2. I gave Randy a wrong direction, which meant he was driving a 38 foot RV with a Jeep in tow down a badly-lit street.
3. We had to unhook the jeep to get turned around.
4. The cat threw up on the bed. 

That’s a lot to handle in one evening and I have to admit that in the confusion, voices were raised.  Just a little.  Just a tad.  At the end of the day I cleaned the floor as best I could, spread Nature’s Miracle around liberally to fix what I couldn’t clean, hand-washed the bedspread, and we spent the night in a Walmart parking lot.

But things always look better in the morning.  Now we are parked in Hieskell, Tennessee and spending time with some good friends we had met in Nova Scotia.  We just finished a great spaghetti dinner (in their RV, not ours!), and life is bearable again.  But I’m going to need to find a powerful carpet cleaner real soon!