Saturday, March 08, 2008
On the Road Again
Well, I set up this blog back in 2005 and haven't done a thing with it during the two years since then. I'm amazed that I even remembered that it was still here. Well, to be honest, I didn't really remember the details; but I knew it was here, somewhere, and I was lucky enough to find it when I searched for it.
Anyway, I'm still not sure what I'll use this space for, but I think I'll update it every now and then as to where we are and what's going on now. So, here goes.
My dad passed away March 25, 2007, and my husband Tim had another heart attack 6 days later. The doctors told him they can't do any surgical repair this time and that all they can do is treat him with medications. After the last heart attack, he was a lot weaker, and none of the doctors can tell him exactly what his prognosis is. We had planned to travel after I retired, but with his health, who knows if he'll be able to travel at that point. After discussing it for a while, we decided that I would "temporarily retire" so that we can travel now while he can still enjoy it.
So, I closed my law office at the end of September 2007, and we hit the road in the Allegro Bay motor home that we had bought in July.
Our dog, Cherry, had been diagnosed in August with multi-centric lymphoma and had started receiving chemotherapy treatment immediately, so we arranged for her to have chemo at various vet schools while we were on the road. I loaded up my scrapbooking supplies, and we gathered a few clothes, some food, and other goodies, and we hit the road.
We spent October, November and most of December in Orlando, Florida, mostly at Walt Disney World, with Tim ending up in Florida Hospital three times during out visit. Fortunately, no new health problems and no more heart attacks, but his health has gone a little more downhill, and his heart function has declined so that his ejection fraction is only 20 percent now. (That's about 1/3 of what it is for a healthy person's heart.) I'm really glad we decided to go ahead and travel while he can enjoy it. I hope things stay stable long enough for him to see the sights that he has always wanted to see, especially those in the western part of the country.
After our stint in Orlando, we headed back to the Knoxville, Tennessee area just before Christmas so that we could be with our kids and grandkids for Christmas. We rented a lot for a month at the Soaring Eagle Campground west of Knoxville, just outside of Lenoir City. We had a wonderful Christmas Day with our family at our daughter's house, then started making plans to get back to traveling, planning to head south the second or third week of January.
We had hoped to see our children and grandchildren a lot during the time we were in the Knoxville area, but that didn't work out very well. Tabitha got to spend a week with us during Christmas break, and we loved that, but we didn't get to spend much time with William or with our children (both working adults). They have a life of their own and didn't have much time to spend with us, which we should have expected; but we had hoped that somehow they'd find more free time. I did get to go with my daughter to the Babies R Us store and help her pick out the items for her baby registry, and I really enjoyed that time with her.
Did I mention that I'm going to be a grandmother again? Well, I am. Yeah!!! Rachel and Jym are pregnant, and the baby is due on August 17th. I really wish that I could spend more time with her during the next few months, but if we're going to travel, we need to do it while Tim's still strong enough to enjoy it. We plan on going back to Knoxville in July so that we can help Rachel out during the month before the baby comes, and I'm not sure if I'll be able to pull myself away from there after the baby is born. Time will tell, but we're keeping our plans flexible for now.
Cherry, our dog, did pretty well with her chemo for a while, but none of the protocols put her into complete remission. When we came back to Knoxville in December, we ended up working with a great doctor at U.T. College of Veterinary Medicine Teaching Hospital, Dr. Stephanie Schleis, and she really tried hard to find a combination of medications that would help Cherry. Dr. Schleis was wonderful about listening to me when I had concerns or worries, and I really appreciate that.
We got a call on New Year's Eve day, letting us know that my sister-in-law was having some problems with her health and needed us to care for her children. So, off to Bristol we went to pick up the kids and started the year off with our 8-year old and 11-year-old nieces in our care. We enrolled the kids in homeschool, Tim went to see his doctors, and then we headed back to Knoxville to get ready to hit the road.
Dr. Schleis placed Cherry on the MOPP protocol in late January, and her lymph nodes went down considerably--not full remission, but much better than they had been previously. This was the fourth protocol that had been tried for her, and it looked like it might be the one that worked, at least for a while.
On February 2nd, we headed south--well, a little bit south--to Chattanooga. Our plan was to go to Huntsville, Birmingham, Montgomery, Mobile and New Orleans during February and March, homeschooling the kids and getting chemo for Cherry at the university vet hospitals along the way. I hated, though, to leave Dr. Schleis at U.T., so we stayed in Chattanooga longer than planned, driving Cherry up to Knoxville when she needed to see the doctor.
While in Chattanooga, we got to visit Rock City, Ruby Falls, and the Tennessee Aquarium, and we bought annual passes for all of them so that we can visit again when we get back to Tennessee. We're hoping that our grandchildren will be able to go with us back to Chattanooga in the summer, but we're not sure yet what their plans are for the summer. At the very least, I hope they'll be able to join us for a brief trip to see the sights in the Chattanooga area.
Unfortunatly, the MOPP treatment was more than Cherry could handle, and she got so ill that she couldn't keep anything down and completely quit eating. She soon became so weak and tired that on February 15th, after much thought and many tears, we made the difficult decision to euthanize Cherry, and she took her final breath in my lap late that morning with my husband and our nieces there with me to say goodbye to her. I miss her so much, but I know that we made the right decision. She was the most faithful, smartest, and most protective little friend that I've ever had, but she was just worn out and we couldn't let her continue to suffer. We'll remember her always, and will have lots of great memories of her running up and down the hill at my dad's house, her cuddling up with me every night, and her "protecting" my dinner plate from the cat, the kids, and anyone else who came near it.
We left Chattanooga on March 3rd. We decided to skip Huntsville for now, and go there when it is warmer, so we headed south towards Birmingham. As usual, we hit the road late in the day, despite plans to get going much earlier. As I began driving across the mountains in northwest Georgia, the winds started coming hard and heavy, pushing the motor home and trailer sideways. After I was almost pushed off the road by the wind, I decided that it was time to stop, so we got permission to park overnight at the Pilot truck stop at exit 4 off I-59 in Georgia. The winds reached more than 40 mph that night, and one tractor-trailer was overturned on the highway by the wind that morning, just down the road from where we stopped, so the decision to stop was definitely the right one.
By the time we got up on March 4th, the storm had passed us (after a night of the motor home being heavily rocked by the winds while everyone else slept and while I lay awake most of the night listening to the wind blow and feeling the home sway back and forth), so we hit the road and headed on into Alabama.
We stopped in Birmingham so that we could take in the local attractions and history. We'd been reading the book Students on Strike on our way from Chattanooga, to help the girls understand a little about the civil rights movement. Our planned stops were the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the Southern Museum of Flight, McWane Science Center, Sloss Furnaces, and the Birmingham Zoo.
We went to the Southern Museum of Flight on the 5th and bought a family membership there. The museum belongs to the Association of Science-Technology Centers, so with the museum membership (just $45), we get free admission to more than 200 science centers and museums around the country with the ASTC Passport program that comes free with our membership. Woohoo!!!
That evening it was off to Circuit City in Hoover, just outside Birmingham, where I had finally located a Nintendo Wii Wi-Fi USB Connector so that we can connect the Wii to the Internet through my computer. Nintendo has discontinued making them, and we'd been looking for one for about a month, so I was excited that we were able to locate one close to our location. We hadn't unloaded the car, so I was driving the motor home and trailer around the Galleria shopping mall--not their usual traffic!
I had parked at the side of Circuit City, so we decided that going around the building would be easier than trying to back out of the area or trying to turn around. Little did I know. We had gotten almost all the way around the back side of a long strip of stores when we came upon a "Road Closed" sign. We were near a loading dock, so I thought I might be able to back into the dock area and turn around. I tried repeatedly, but there were 2 semi trailers in the docks, and there just wasn't enough room for our total 62-foot length to get turned around, despite Tim's and my best efforts. There was no going forward, so that left me with the option of backing all the way back around the buildings while Tim guided me. Did I mention that there were two large curves in the roadway around the buildings, it was late at night (very dark), the pavement was not all that wide, and there was a sheer drop-off on the other side of the guard rail?
Finally, with much patience and guidance from Tim, I backed the motor home and trailer around the buildings and we were able to get turned around. And it only took, oh, probably 30 to 45 minutes. LOL Unfortunately, after we got turned around, I kept smelling something that smelled like hot, burnt oil, and then I noticed smoke coming out from under the motor home. Tim checked, and thank goodness we weren't on fire! I figured that the strain of all the backing up (and pulling forward, and backing up and pulling forward, and backing up, etc., trying to get around the buildings and the curves) had over-heated the engine, but the temperature gauge was reading normal.
So, we headed out of the parking lot, planning to pull into a Wal-Mart parking lot to sleep for the night. As I started around the corner, I thought I heard the transmission slipping, and after I stopped for the first red light, there was no doubt. Fortunately, there was a wide shoulder on the road, so I pulled off to let the transmission cool off, thinking that all the backing up and pulling forward had made it too hot. By that point, I had figured out that the burnt oil odor was transmission fluid. After we let things cool down for a little while, I tried to move the motor home, but it wasn't going anywhere. It was obvious that the transmission was having some serious problems.
Thank goodness, we have AAA Plus RV, so we called for a tow to the nearest Wal-Mart, with plans to do what they call a "continuation tow" in the morning after we found some place that could work on the motor home. It was about 10:00 when we called AAA, and they sent a heavy duty truck out to us. Since they needed the big truck for us, they had to call its driver in, so it took a couple of hours before the tow truck arrived. We ate a late supper while we waited, and we finally arrived at the Wal-Mart (3 miles away) around 1:30 a.m.
In the morning, I called a local RV dealer (Heritage RV, I believe), and Mr. Condry, a very nice gentleman, told me that they don't do major transmission repairs, but he recommended two local transmission shops. I contacted Barry's Transmissions, and Barry said that he could repair it but that he didn't have any equipment large enough to get the transmission out so that he could work on it. He made a few phone calls, and, shortly thereafter, Wes from Passmore Towing and Recovery called me and said that his company could take the transmission out and take it over to Barry's.
So we called AAA and had them take the motor home over to Passmore to start the repairs. Barry told me that he thought he could have us back on the road by the next afternoon, even if he had to completely rebuild the transmission, so that was good news. The bad news was that if it was "just" the front transmission seal, it would cost about $1000 and if it needed a complete rebuild, it would be $2500 or more. Ouch!
Did I mention that, when I talked with Wes at Passmore, he assured me that they had equipment that could handle the motor home? When we arrived, we noticed that there were no lifts large enough to handle a motor home, but we figured that they would have some heavy-duty floor jacks that could raise the RV high enough to get the transmission out. Next thing I see, after we parked the motor home, was a mechanic trying to put 2 small jackstands (3-ton capacity, by the way) under the front of the motor home to raise it up enough. No way that was going to work! So we all started brainstorming, and finally Tim came up with a possible solution. Using the jack stands, they got the motor home up high enough to slide a wheel, lying on its side, under each front tire. That elevated the RV about 6 to 8 inches. But that, of course, wasn't enough for removal of the transmission. So then the mechanic got some wood pieces, placed them underneath the motor home's leveling jacks, and had me lower the jacks onto the wood to raise the RV some more. Then he got a floor jack and moved our home up some more. By the time all was said and done, the RV was up high enough for him to get under it to take the transmission out, but the mess that was holding it up reminded me up a Rube Goldberg contraption. I really wish I had taken pictures! I can't believe I didn't--I even had my camera in my pocket! Even with all that, he had to raise one side of the motor home some more, tilting it over quite a bit, in order to actually get the transmission out. Finally, about 6 p.m, they had it out!
Since our home was perched so precariously, we decided to head to a local motel for the night. After much deliberation over prices and many phone calls, and thanks to the coupon book that Cheyenne had picked up at a rest area (after I told her not to bother--that we wouldn't need a motel since we had the RV--famous last words!), we ended up at the Comfort Inn that was two exits down the road in a very large, comfortable room. Tim did a couple of loads of laundry in their laundromat (we were almost out of clean underwear, oops!), and we all took showers in a regular tub with as much hot water as we wanted. I thought that Cheyenne was going to pass out from pleasure! Don't get me wrong, the girls do great in the motor home, and they take showers with plenty of hot water at the campgrounds where we stay, but it's just not quite the same as hoping into the bathroom and turning the shower on and staying as long as you want to.
I checked the weather, and a very cold front (at least for that part of the country) was moving in, with temperatures in the mid to low 20's expected by Saturday, with possible snow. Hadn't we been moving southward to get away from the cold? And now it was following us. Tim and I discussed the situation, and we decided that we could come back to Birmingham when it was warmer; our final decision: Now is the time to head to the beaches in Florida. The girls' reaction: Yeah!
The next morning, the girls and I got up and went downstairs to check out the hotel's continental breakfast. They both had Belgian waffles, boiled eggs, and milk. I made a Belgian waffle for me, too, but it was too sweet, so I ended up eating tuna and crackers when we got back up to the room.
Barry called around 10:30 that morning and told us that our tranmission was repaired and that he would be taking it back over to Passmore right away. Fortunately, it didn't need to be completely rebuilt. He put in a new forward clutch, new middle bands, new seals and gaskets, and a new torque convertor. Total bill for his services was around $960, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.
We got packed up, checked out of the hotel around noon, and headed back over to Passmore. When we got there, they were trying to figure out how to get the transmission back into the motor home. Everything had to be lined up more carefully to put it back in, and the mechanic was going to need more clearance to get it back in than he had needed in getting it out. He got a floor jack and tilted it up quite a bit so that it was listing pretty well to one side.
At that point, we decided that our smartest move was to head somewhere else and hope that they had good insurance if things went wrong. I found a $25 gift card that I'd been saving, so off to Olive Garden we went for their all-you-can-eat soup, salad and breadsticks. We got there a little before 3 and didn't leave until after 4:30. Our waitress was a little ditzy, but she was really nice; and the girls most definitely enjoyed the meal. We all left the restaurant over-stuffed and decided that the meal would count for both lunch and supper.
Back to Passmore at that point, and the transmission still wasn't in. We were afraid to watch, so we headed back out in search of a Coke Icee for me. (Did I mention that I have a Coke Icee addiction?) We finally found one at a Burger King near the motel where we had stayed the night before, and then we headed back to Passmore. It was around 6:00, and they finally had the transmission back in the motor home. They were in the process of trying to get the transmission fluid at the right level. Unfortunately, after they got the right amount of fluid in it, when we tried to shift gears the gear shift indicator was out of whack: low was where second should be, second was where drive should be, drive was where neutral should be, neutral was where reverse lived, reverse had found a new home at park, and park was nowhere to be found. I told them that, prior to taking the transmission out, all the gears had shown up at the right place on the indicator, so they decided they'd check the cable. Thankfully, they found that it wasn't on quite right, and a small adjustment put everything back where it belonged.
Then it was time to get the motor home off the leveling jacks, the wood blocks, the jack stands, the floor jacks, and the wheels. By that time, I was so tired that I can't tell you the details of how it was accomplished (thank goodness, you say?)--all I know is that I stayed at the wheel and when they told me to put the jacks up or down, I did what I was told to do, like a good little girl.
Eventually all 4 tires were back on solid ground, and it was time for a test drive. No one wanted to take the motor home for a spin, so I said I'd drive it if one of the mechanics would go with me (in case something went wrong). The head honcho, Dave (I think), said he'd ride with me, so off we went, down the road. The transmission didn't seem to be shifting right, so Dave asked me if I had the emergency brake on. I checked, and it wasn't on. Still no shifting. Finally I looked at the gear shift indicator, and I had put it into "2"nd instead of "D"rive. Arrrgghh! After correcting my error, I drove a few more blocks, and it shifted properly during the rest of our drive.
Finally, around 8 p.m., they pulled our trailer around so that we could hook it up, Tim got everything re-attached, and we pulled out, heading to the Wal-Mart in Pelham, about 15 miles down the road. I drove the motor home, and Tim drove the car; since we weren't going very far, we had decided it wasn't worth the effort to load the car into the trailer. As we got closer to where I thought the exit should be, the less sure I became about where it really was. I called Tim on his cell phone, and we decided that if we came to I-65 South before we came to the exit for the Wal-Mart, then we'd just head south and stay at a different Wal-Mart. The next exit turned out to be I-65 South, so southward we went. We stopped briefly at an Alabama rest area (where we were able to dump our holding tanks and take on fresh water--always a good thing) and finally stopped for the night at the Wal-Mart in Clanton, Alabama, which is about halfway between Birmingham and Montgomery.
And what was coming our way? More storms with high winds! So, we decided to just stay put at the Wal-Mart all day today (Saturday), playing Guitar Hero III and relaxing. It turned out that the winds were around 20 mph, so I think we made a smart decision. We had a fairly relaxing day, cooked some hot dogs and french fries for dinner, and planned to turn in early tonight so we can get on the road again tomorrow. I think that a "day off" every now and then is good for all of us.
The winds have died down, and it's supposed to be calm all day tomorrow, so I hope we'll make it to Dothan, Alabama, or maybe even into Florida. We plan to stop at Tallahassee to see the Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science. It sounds like it will be a good field trip for the girls, with lots of learning experiences, and it's a member of the Association of Science-Technology Centers, so we'll get in free. The girls haven't been to the beach before, though, so we'll be heading further south pretty quickly to get into warmer weather and to be able to hit the beaches. If the weather's good, we'll probably head over toward Melbourne and drop in to see my aunt while we're in the area, then maybe spend a little time in Orlando and then head to points further south (and warmer).
We've learned many things during our travels so far. Among other things, we have learned that, although we read several books about motor homes and RV travel before we hit the road, we knew next to nothing about living in a motor home (and still have lots to learn even now, six months later). We have learned that homeschooling at 9 p.m. works just as well as homeschooling at 9 a.m. We have learned that it's really hard to say goodbye to a faithful, loving canine friend, even when everyone knows that it's the right time to say goodbye. We have learned that there's no such thing as privacy in a motor home, that there's no such thing as too much warm shower water, and that there's no such thing as too many hugs. We've learned that kids understand a lot more than the grownups think they do, but also that they don't understand some things that we grownups figure they should understand; and for both situations, that a little patience goes a long way.
I'm sure there are lots more lessons out there to be learned. In the meantime, we'll keep rolling down the road, finding new places to see, learning new things, and trying to have a good time as we roll along.
It's getting late now, and we want to get on the road early tomorrow, so it's time to end this missive. Maybe I'll be back to write more sooner, without waiting more than two years for the next entry. Who knows?
Until then, remember:
"All that is gold does not glitter,
not all those who wander are lost."
~ J.R.R. Tolkien
Labels: motor home, musings, travel
