Mammoth Meanders to Massachusetts Day 1

Home to West Memphis, AR
Mon 5 June 2023 

After a very routine and early start (8:30, on the dot), we made excellent time. But somewhere a little east of Little Rock the minor disasters began to strike. First, the hanging cupboard over the front dashboard decided to pull loose from its front screws. There were four of them, wood screws that secure it into whatever is above. And then, suddenly, they didn't.

 

 

Luckily the back part of it was still securely fastened and it didn't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. I propped it up with the wand of the vacuum cleaner and a couple of paperback books.  And I unloaded all of the heavy books and things that had recently been moved to it and will not restore them anytime soon. Most were pretty unnecessary anyhow, and when we return home I'll take them out of Mammoth permanently.

Then as we rolled along, Ed and I kept getting hotter and hotter. The air was blowing from the overhead air conditioner vents, but it wasn't cool at all. When we stopped for gas at the Love's in West Memphis, we discovered that the generator wasn't running. It had tripped its breaker.

 

In this case, Ed thinks he may have caused stress or possibly a small short in the wiring while he was working on the transfer switch issues.  By the way, this trip almost didn't happen--we had a short power outage about a week before the trip and it fried our transfer switch. No shore power was able to make its way into the RV and the generator power as well. Nothing.

But that was fixed a few days before. Whew.

 

 

 

When he got the generator turned on, we were able proceed the remaining four miles to TomSawyer's RV Park. Right smack on the banks f the Mississippi River!  The place is cool!!!

And then it started lightninging, gusting, and spitting. And then raining--not hard, but steady. It should stop at just about bedtime...I hoped Molly would get her walk before then.

Funny, too--when the wind first picked up, the whole place stunk to high heavens. Dead fish or algae or some such ickiness. But the storm cleared that out.

There are barges going down the river. We've seen two so far. Super cool--my Dad would have loved this place so much!

It stopped raining long enough for Ed to decide to cook our steak/fish on the grill, and for Molly to get a bit of a walk. We walked briskly down and around--the place is huge--but all the other dog owners were out taking their dogs for walks, too. So we had to keep changing direction and reversing course, and didn't have such a good time. There were birds, too, but it was getting a little too dark by then to see them.

By the way, Mammoth RV made the trip in 6 hours 50 minutes, which is interesting because I'd noted it down as a 6:30 trip on Google maps.  So only 20 minutes total of stoppage time, however, I know for sure that the three gas stops we made added up to at least 50 minutes.

I'd been worried that planning a 6:30 drive was a bit of an overreach, even on the first day of a trip. But I figured that if any drive needed to be long, that was the correct one to choose--we were fresh from home after a good night's sleep, and it was almost all interstate highway and known roads.