Hello from Boonville, MO

Monday evening July 27, 2009 (third travelogue of this trip)

We are at a Super 8 hotel in this fun little town. We have stayed here a few times, but we were always in the bus and stayed in the parking lot of the Isle of Capri Casino.

I feel like a race horse trying to catch up on all that has happened since we started this interrupted trip. So let's start with the days leading up to this leg of the trip. As I noted in the last blog, we had to return to Evergreen to work on the bus. I got the engine out and delivered it to the local Detroit Diesel Dealer on Tuesday (7/7). I discussed the terrible findings in our last post to this blog. For the next several days, we went through just about every emotion you can think of. We were dealing with what to do on the bus and trying to make a decision about the major FMCA rally in Bowling Green, OH.

We finally decided to drive to Bowling Green in one of our cars. We had paid for the booth and it would look bad to have an empty booth with our name on it.

We departed Evergreen Friday (7/17) at 7:00 AM with almost 1300 miles to cover in 3 days. Everything went well for the first 100 miles. We stopped at a rest stop and during the stop I got a call from a potential customer that was quite intriguing. I decided to start driving while still on the phone with the customer. After we got on the road, I hit the cruise control and the Durango seemed to struggle getting up to speed. I did not pay attention and kept talking to the customer. As it turns out, I had the transmission selector in probably second gear and when I looked down the engine was quite a ways into the red region on the tach. I knew that was not good. We made it another 20 miles and the engine started knocking. We called AAA and had them pick us up on a wrecker. We got the Durango back to the house about 2:00 PM and quickly packed the PT Cruiser with a downsized load and left at 2:45. By this time we were completely numb, but determined to not let a silly thing like blowing up an engine stop us.

That night we make it to North Platte, NE and stayed in a Super 8 motel. Plain ,but it did not matter. This seemed a bit strange to us, since we often stop in North Platte and stay at the Wal Mart in the bus (great parking).

The next day we drove to Davenport, IA and again stayed in a Super 8. We had a great time, as there was a huge car show at the local mall. We even had a great dinner at a local restaurant.

We made it to Bowling Green in the late afternoon on Sunday (7/19 my birthday). We had reservations at what turned out to be the “hotel from hell”. The two rooms they tried to put us in did not have the fridge and microwave we asked for and were very dirty. I don't think many of the “guests” spoke English. We quickly got on the phone with the Holiday Inn folks and found a great Holiday Inn Express in Perrysburg, OH (map), about 15 miles from Bowling Green. Pat negotiated a pretty good rate and we crashed for the night.

I will stop here and we will continue to try to catch up in the next few posts.