Sunday, 9/25: 69 miles, "camped" at Exit 162 Commuter Parking, I-55 in Missouri  |
Route we were supposed to drive to Memphis.
X marks as far as we got! |
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| Commuter Parking Lot, Exit 162 on I-55 |
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| Parked and "camping" with the left rear axle blocked up. |
We got an early 9:30 start today as it was going to be a long drive. We chose to take the Interstate so we would get to West Memphis sooner and have time to relax and watch barge traffic on the river. About an hour into the trip, disaster!!!! In my mirror I saw a tire rolling down the Interstate behind me. Yikes, can it be ours? I was able to pull off on the shoulder and inspect. Yep, it was ours. After the adrenaline calmed down and we got our wits together, we calmly (ya, right) got on the phone. AAA was absolutely no help. All these years we have been paying an exorbitant annual fee that we thought covered our RV. Well, it didn't!! They didn't offer to help in the tiniest bit. Not even look up a phone number for us to call. Next we called Onstar. They would bail us out, right? Nope! They only cover the vehicle and not anything being pulled by it. I begged. I could hear her thumbing through a phone book and she gave us a number to some kind of repair service. We called them. Nope, they don't do service work on Sunday. Next, we called the closest Love's Truck Stop. Nope, they don't work on passenger vehicles. Only commercial vehicles. Judy found a service online called Pippin, who advertises 24 hour service. We finally got lucky, sort of. They would help us, but the mechanic was working on another roadside RV issue on Interstate 70 and it would be 3 to 4 hours before he could get to us. We booked him, and sure enough he showed up 4 hours later on the dot. He even called us in the meantime a couple times to check on us. While we waited on the roadside for those 4 hours with traffic whizzing by at 70 miles per hour, 3 good samaritans stopped to offer help. While there was nothing they could do, their moral support was really appreciated!!
When Robert from Pippin showed up, our fortunes began to change. What a godsend to have such a positive and encouraging gentleman for a mechanic. He got the axle strapped up so the wheel hub wouldn't drag on the highway and directed us to a commuter parking lot only 2 miles away. We limped along at 10 miles per hour with Robert following with his blue emergency lights flashing. What a relief it was to get to the parking lot and away from traffic!
What caused the tire to fall off in the first place? Well, it turns out the the young mechanic that changed the original flat in St. Peters had done so with a battery impact wrench and had never double checked the tightness on the lug bolts by hand. So after only 60 miles of traveling, the rim had started to loosen and eventually snapped all the lug bolts and the tire fell off. We never felt or heard a thing in the truck. Lesson learned, always watch and check the mechanics work!!
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| Beautiful large and spacious campsite at the commuter parking lot. 😀 |
Being Sunday, it was a foregone conclusion that getting parts today was impossible. Robert was sure he could get them Monday morning. We weren't so sure. A similar problem happened to Judy's sister Sue and husband Al in Maine a couple years ago, and it took a week to get parts. Another good samaritan, Roger, who is a local contractor and has a camper, stopped by that evening and the next morning to check on us. As Luke Bryan sings in a line from one of his country songs, "most people are good".
Monday, 9/26:Not knowing how long we would have to stay in the parking lot with no water or electricity, we went shopping this morning in nearby Festus at Walmart for water, and Lowes for tools to change our own tire in the future. Robert called about 10:30 and said he had all the parts and was at the camper. Amazing!! We were still at Lowes, but said we would be right back. No rush he said. He would clean the brake pads and grease the wheel bearings in the meantime.
At 1:00 we got back on the road and were heading to West Memphis, $1,000 poorer but richer by meeting 2 wonderful gentlemen from Missouri. Sooooo, if you are ever going to break down, schedule it to happen near the Exit 160 area on Interstate 55 and call Pippin Truck Service at
http://pippintruckservice.com/
Now our Memphis visit is 2 nights instead of the original 4. Oh well, all part of the adventure. As the the expression goes, "Stay calm and carry on".
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| Tom Sawyer RV Park, site 93. |
Finally, 237 miles and 2 days late, we pulled into the Tom Sawyer RV Park at about 5:00 to continued warm and sunny weather. We have stayed here before and really like this park. It is right on the river (our site was 100 feet from the river bank) and the views are amazing. The park is in West Memphis, Arkansas, with Memphis, Tennessee right across the river. While we were not so much physically tired, we were mentally drained after the last two days. Dinner was leftovers while we watched river barge traffic from our site.
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| Tired, but relieved to be settled at the Tom Sawyer Park. |
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| Evening traffic on the river. |
Tuesday, 9/27:
Today we did absolutely nothing but read, dog walk along the river, and watch barge traffic. It was a very slow and relaxing day. I went crazy taking pictures of barge traffic, but I'll include only a few. I continued to read the Ringer Buck book about taking a wooden flat boat down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and how he learned to navigate the river amongst the throng of barges. One thing we learned is that the barge traffic never sleeps. They run 24 hours a day.
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| Early morning traffic. |
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| Sunrise over Memphis, Tennessee. |
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I was chatting with a camper from Alberta, Canada. He had never seen barges like this.
Between us we found this app to download. It marked barge locations on the river in current time.
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| Oops, Judy caught me watching barge traffic. |
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| The barges even run all night long. |
A few Mississippi barge facts to leave you with:
- Agriculture cargos include corn, soybeans, cotton, wheat
- Construction cargos include lumber, sand, gravel, crushed rock
- Industrial cargos include coal, coke, iron, steel
- Barge pushing tugs range in horse power from 600 to 11,000
- A single barge load ships the equivalent of 15 rail road cars, or 58 tractor trailer truck loads
- River cruise ships sail the Mississippi also.
Next stop for us is the Vidalia, Louisiana and Natchez, Mississippi area.
