The Trip Back
It was a beautiful morning and although we had intended to get up early and be out at a reasonable hour, the bed felt too nice so we slept in until after 8:00 AM. It took a while to get the car loaded on the dolly, fill the water tank, and say our goodbyes and we ended up not getting on the road until after 10:00. The drive to Moncton was uneventful. We hit a little rain near Halifax and had a little bit of sunshine, but for the most part the skies were overcast, which is what I prefer. Just like two weeks earlier there were seven other RVs at the Wal-mart where we stopped, but this time even though we pulled into the exact same spot as before, the rest of them stayed on the opposite side of the parking lot, which was fine with us and allowed us to run our generator guilt-free.
The next morning we got up at 5:00 AM, an unheard of hour for us, but it allowed us to be on the road early so that we could get to Scarborough Maine by mid-afternoon. It was a tough drive of about 400 miles with a lot of heavy fog in the morning and then down in Maine we were buffeted by gusty winds all afternoon. I am sure that only the old geezers among us remember how driving a vehicle with loose steering used to back before modern power steering took all the slop out of it, but this old vintage bus still has the old style steering and with probably more than a million miles of wear on the components and the huge flat sides of the bus, the winds push the thing all over the lane and kept me busy trying to keep from drifting into the constant stream of 18-wheelers passing us.
After an 8-hour drive, I was happy to finally pull into the Cabela’s parking lot where we would be staying for the night. We were now traveling toward the west and these 61 year-old eyes do not handle driving toward the sun as well as they once did. In my youth I could drive over 12 hours straight with few problems but that was then and this is now. We finished the day with a dinner of Pad Thai, a drink, and a final Cabela’s shopping spree and we turned in early. I wanted to get an early start again in the morning but when I looked at the clock and it said 5:00 AM I just could not make myself get out of bed. For once the cat had not jumped on the bed in the wee hours hoping to be fed. The next time I checked the clock it was 6:00 AM, so we got up. The funny thing was though that Flora had forgotten to set the time forward when we had crossed back into the Eastern Time zone so we really had gotten up at 5:00!
We were on the road by shortly after 6:00 and hoped to make good time, but first I had to refuel in New Hampshire. I should have gone to the same truck stop I visited a couple of weeks earlier but that one was located several miles off of I-95 and was a little tough to get into so I queried the GPS for a different place; that was my first mistake. The GPS said that the place I chose was 1.8 miles from I-95. That is one shortcoming with our GPS unit; buses don’t fly the way crows do. The other problems are that it does not give you any indication of whether a particular gas station has diesel, whether I can get this 55 foot long “train” in and out of the place, or what the access roads are like. We ended up heading down a little country road, into a subdivision that had a “no vehicles over 5 tons” sign posted (we weigh in closer to 13 tons), through the middle of some town with very narrow streets, and then another 10 miles through more subdivisions. We ended up at a convenience store with no way to access the single diesel pump. I stopped and got out and walked around and decided that if I could drive out, cross the street and enter a parking lot on the other side, and then turn around and drive back into the pump area I could probably get close enough to the pump to fuel up. So I started the thing up and made my move but by the time I had turned around and pulled back in, an old man had pulled his car up to the pump I needed so that he could gas up, and of course he was having trouble with his credit card. It would not have been so bad but when I pulled in behind him, the car I was towing was blocking the exit to the store. He fiddled with the pump, washed his windshield, went inside to pay, and after what seemed like an eternity I was finally able to pull up to the pump and fuel up. Of course it took several minutes longer than it should have because I had to do 4 separate transactions since the credit card companies limit each purchase to $75. Each time, I had to remove the hose, shut down the machine, answer some questions, wait for a receipt, and then re-insert my credit card and go through the whole process again.
The way the convenience store exit was structured I could see that there was no way to pull out without backing up. The tow dolly instructions had explicitly said (and the guy who sold it to me re-iterated) never to attempt to back up with the dolly attached, but here I was with no other option except uncoupling the car and the dolly, a half hour procedure. I finished my business, started the bus, put her in reverse, and hoped the world would not end as I started to back up. Everything went fine and we got out without ruining anything, and after retracing our steps we got back on I-95 having wasted an hour and a half and driving an extra 30 miles. New Hampshire apparently has strict laws forbidding many kinds of signs on their highways, which sure makes it tough to find anything. In retrospect I would have been better off to have paid the extra fifteen cents a gallon gas tax while I was in Maine and been done with it – lesson learned.
At long last we were back on the road with very heavy traffic and constant stoppages on the Massachusetts Turnpike; it was already a very long day. In the late afternoon we finally decided to pass by the Wal-marts at both Fishkill NY and Newburg NY and aim for the one in Pittston PA, where we had stopped on the way up. We knew that the parking lot was not very level and that there would be truck noise, but it was at least a known quantity so we drove until we got there at the end of a 10-hour day, the longest so far.
For the first time in over two weeks we had to use the air conditioning and tomorrow was forecast to be much hotter. After two weeks of highs below 70 we were not sure we were ready to re-enter the blast furnace that this year had been in the south. We stopped at a rest area in Virginia and I changed into some shorts and we were back on the road with another hour and a half to drive before our stop for the night in Staunton.
I was very happy to stop, pull the blinds, and sit in the cool air conditioned air for a while. 95 degrees in late September is just plain wrong and we still had a few things to learn about cooling the bus. For one thing, I had turned off the defroster hot water and assumed that the hot water that fed it would therefore be cut off, but there was one helluva lot of hot air blowing from under the dash, which did not help a bit. Additionally, it took some doing before we figured out how to close the rear-facing air conditioner vents, which were at the time directing at least half of the cold air toward the back of the bus rather than toward us in the front. After we parked I double checked the valve and yes, it was turned off, but I did find a little door under the dash that directed warm air toward the driver, which would be nice in the winter but not so nice when it is 95 degrees outside. As for why hot water is presumably still going into the defroster, I need to add that to the list of questions for the mechanic when we get back.
This proved to be the most aggravating of our Wal-mart overnight experiences. Because we cannot back up, I always try to park with enough room that I can pull straight out in the morning. Maybe I need to also get some parking cones to put in front on the bus because it seems that there is always some jackass who wants to park right on my front bumper. This time some guy pulled in a parked in front of us for about 6 hours while he used his cell phone; this was apparently his traveling office. Additionally, we were wedged between a guy with a very loud generator that ran all night on one side, and an 18-wheeler with a generator that ran all night on the other side. The weather cooled down enough to open the vents by about 9:00 PM and the generator sounds lulled us to sleep.
We got up at 6:00 AM and left early to beat the heat, not wanting a repeat of yesterday’s baking performance. The settings I made to the defroster and air conditioner seemed make a big difference as we powered on toward home. I had one final stop to dump our tank at a Flying J in Graham but after having trouble negotiating the parking lot and with tempers wearing thin, we left without accomplishing our goal and headed for home after topping off our fuel. It was 95 degrees as we pulled up out front and began unloading the car, which was again liberally coated with engine oil from the bus. Pulling into the parking spot I high-centered the bus when a front wheel rolled into a depression and I added filling the hole to my to-do list for the upcoming week. We were happy to be home even with the intense heat.
