Nashville, Memphis, and Little Rock – 10/13-16/18

The weather turned unseasonably cold and wet after we left Walnut Hollow Ranch in North Carolina, so we only stayed for a 1 ½ days in Nashville and one day each in Memphis and Little Rock (Arkansas).  Just below are a few photos — the rest of my blog entry follows the photos, so please read on!

As I’m writing this, we’re driving our way to the city of Texarkana – at the border of Texas and Arkansas.  It’s not that we want to be there, but rather it happens to be about a 3-hour drive from Little Rock, so it’s a logical place to stopover.  Obviously, if I’m typing this blog entry while we’re driving, that means that Karen is driving the RV.  I’m thankful that she’s willing to share in the driving load.  What we seem to be hearing as we meet more RVer couples with the big motorhomes is that she’s among the minority – many of the women aren’t comfortable with driving the big rig.  To be real, Karen would fully admit that she has to mentally “gear-up” for doing the driving, but that it’s easier to gear-up for it by continuing to do it. Meaning, that if too much time goes by since the last time she drove, there’s a greater level of anxiety to conquer when getting into the driver’s seat.  And, this isn’t gender specific – I go through exactly the same thing she does. It is one of the things I love about her – her willingness to jump in and give things a try.

I’d like to use the rest of this blog entry to let you in on an example of the comedy of errors that we live through as part of our RV experience.  Yesterday was a doozy. Maybe it was because it was cold and rainy, which makes one want to hurry a little faster through the pre-trip routine.  Or maybe it was because we get a little casual in the way we approach pre-trip stuff as we get more comfortable with it. Here’s how things went.  As we were exiting the RV park to begin our trip to Little Rock, a pickup truck pulls up next to us, blows its horn, and the guys inside are waving.  I open the window and they yell up to me “Hey, do you know that one of your slide-outs is out?”  Apparently, one of the slide-outs in the rear that makes our bedroom more spacious was still out – we’d forgotten to retract it.  That’s actually pretty embarrassing.  It’s almost like driving your car with one of the rear doors open.

The second “error” was related to our windshield wipers.  Coincidentally, we’ve hardly ever had to drive in the rain in the RV, so we haven’t used the wipers very often.  It also means that we haven’t changed the wiper blades…ever.  When we started to use the wipers yesterday, they made nice screechy noises and didn’t exactly arc smoothly along the windshield.  That’s annoying in and of itself, but the problem occurred when we were driving on the interstate and all of a sudden, the passenger wiper blade comes loose from the wiper arm and is flapping around almost ready to come off and fly away.  We had to quickly pull over onto the shoulder of the interstate, which is never fun with an RV, and use some Velcro tape to temporarily affix the wiper back onto the arm. Of course, this was all having to be done in the rain.

The third error of the day was related to our Honda CRV, which we tow behind us with all four wheels on the road.  Because we tow it with all four wheels down, we have to go through a routine each day to make sure it’s in neutral, the ignition is switched on to allow the steering wheel to move but not start the engine, and to make sure everything is turned off in the car that would drain the battery, since that ignition position allows things to run, such as the radio.  One of the things we learned is that if our cellphones have Bluetooth enabled, even if we’re in the RV, they activate the Bluetooth capability in the car, which puts a drain on the battery.  So, part of our routine is to make sure we turn off our Bluetooth function on our phones.  In any event, when we arrived in Little Rock at the RV park yesterday afternoon, we started our normal process of disconnecting the car from the RV….except that when Karen tried to start the car, the battery was dead.  There’s our dead car now blocking other folks who are trying to get past us to get into or out of the RV park.  Thankfully, another RVer in the park was willing to give our Honda a jump start.  We’re still not sure what drained the battery, but we think another one of our devices might have had Bluetooth on and was connecting to the car while were towing it.

The fourth and final error of the day was discovered shortly after the car battery incident, when we were going through our usual routine to get the RV set up at the park, which includes plugging in the electricity, hooking up water, and hooking up the sewage hose.  When I opened the RV compartment door where the hookups are for the water and sewage, I noticed that the valves for our grey water and black water tanks were still open from the morning, when I had opened them to empty our tanks out before we left the previous RV park.  Of course, after you empty the tanks, you’re supposed to close them up again so that they can do their job.  Having left them open wasn’t really a problem once the tanks were empty.  The problem was that since the valves hadn’t been closed, when Karen and I decided to use our RV bathroom while on the drive, we didn’t know that the tanks weren’t going to hold their contents.  Imagine, if you will, pouring liquid into a bathtub but forgetting to close the drain – the liquid doesn’t stay in the bathtub. Hopefully, I don’t have to get more specific to help you understand what that meant in terms of our tanks….

I share all of this because I want to give you an idea of the full experience of RVing.  We are getting a chance to go to some cool places…but sometimes we’re amazed that we even make it to those places! Hopefully, these incidents will become a little less frequent as we become more experienced, but based on the anecdotes we hear from other veteran RVers, it sounds like we’re going to have many more days like this!