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Sunday, July 28th, 2013
Today we traveled 70 miles in 8 hours. First of all, we tried our new laptop GPS program. Bill had the output ported to the TV and back-up camera monitor. Great, we thought. The volume was fantastic; however, the pc program “Streets and Trips” was more lost than we were. We constantly heard, “calculating new route, make U turn”. It’s very hard to make a U turn in a 36 foot motor home pulling a 20 foot SUV. We were testing this new program since we will be unable to use our Android GPS application while in Canada.
Now for the event of the day….
We were traveling down I35 in a construction zone with an excessive amount of turns when Bill noticed a red car in the fast lane laying back and not passing us. He assumed that the driver was fearful of us not maintaining our lane. He noticed that he could see the Tahoe in the rear view mirror (you are not suppose to see the car you are towing in the mirror). He was in the process of pulling over to the side when the red car finally passed signaling us to pull over. One leg of the tow bar broke the anchoring bolt and the Tahoe hit the motor home. When the arm drug on the grown, the emergency cable deployed and the safety chains, along with the remaining arm, contained the Tahoe. It’s Sunday today, RV part stores are not open. We went to Walmart where Bill tried buying something but that didn’t work so he returned it. We then went to Home Depot where he purchased two grade 8 bolts, drilled holes in the ends and used them to reattach the tow bar. We dented the exhaust’s chrome tip but fortunately that was the only damage to the motor home. What a scare that was!
After Bill had pulled over to the side of I35 and disconnected the car I drove the Tahoe and began following him. Daisy was immediately stressed out when she and Bill drove away in the motor home without me. She went to the door and began barking so insistently that Bill had to pull over again and bring her to me in the Tahoe. We were all fairly stressed by this time.
I talked to Jim while Bill was repairing the tow bar and he reminded me how lucky we are that Bill can fix just about anything that happens. We are indeed very lucky. If I had been driving the motor home when this happened I don’t think seeing the Tahoe in the motor home’s mirror would have registered with me that something was terribly wrong.
Once the repairs were made Bill reprogrammed our cell phone’s GPS and we started down the road. We had one additional problem. He put the wrong address in and the GPS took us way out of our way. What a day!!
We are staying at the Grand Casino RV Park (Indian casino) in Hinckley, Minnesota. Every one of the Indian casino RV parks that we’ve stayed at are great. This one is no exception. We are happy to end this travel day. We are so fortunate that we don’t have any time constraints. When I consider all that happened today, I would say we handled it all fairly well. I am happy to say that we will stay put tomorrow. We are spending two nights here.
