Magnus Goes Home to Thor, Day 7

Wednesday, October 30

Oh, the day of stupid mistakes.  But first, the normal stuff.

Our hotel had a tiny little breakfast laid out. Plenty of coffee, fruit, oatmeal and muffins, but nothing for a meat-eater like Ed to subsist on.  So we popped over to a nearby restaurant--Kylies or some such--for eggs and stuff. I had biscuits with gravy, which were very good (yes, I know gravy is made with meat drippings, but I loooovvve it and never make it at home) except that it was more than I wanted. The two biscuits were served with the gravy on top, so I couldn't do one with gravy and the other with jelly like I prefer to do.  But it was still pretty good.

Then we checked out and headed up to Elkhart to kill a few hours at the RV Hall of Fame Museum. Since we were passing right by the repair shop, we stopped to talk to the service manager but he didn't have a firm date yet. No problem--he promised to call us later and he did.

 

 

The museum was pretty nice.  Lots of old RVs from the 1930s up through the 1970s or so. I wished the placards had been more informative--often they were sketchy. But we got to go inside about half of them and could figure out the features for ourselves--like the water tank approach, the heaters and lighting and all.

 It is so amazing to think that back before I was born, people were already loading up their gear into a box on wheels and traveling across the U.S. to see the sights. I mean, we all have an image of the covered wagon pioneers--they traveled to find a new home. And the dustbowl refugees of the depression--they loaded up their lives into pickup trucks or wagons and moved to California.  But these exhibits were of people like us--people who had a home but took vacations in Florida and Grand Canyon and Yosemite and all those scenic place. How cool is that?  Our grandparents--MY grandparents and I'm a grandparent myself--were going places.

I was bowled over.  There wasn't much else--the modern RV exhibit was limited to this one extremely huge and ridiculously ugly big thing.  And behind that was a display of pre-fab modular homes and a big sales pitch about why these were so much superior to the old mobile homes and even better than bricks-and-sticks houses.  They were nice, I'll admit, and seemed to be designed to withstand a hurricane or maybe even Texas turdfloater rainstorms.  Interesting; not exciting.

And now to the disaster.  With a couple of hours to kill, I decided to make a reservation at the hotel for the night. I got online on my phone with it's three-by-six inch screen and found the hotel I'd chosen previously--the Holiday Inn Express in North Springfield.  Except...it was in Springfield Illinois and I had not made a note of the state.  So when I reserved a room, it ended up being in Springfield Missouri. Nine hours away.

Our Thor tour was supposed to take an hour, from 3 to 4. But we were the only two people on the tour, and we kept getting into conversation with the nice guy--the product design manager for several lines of motorcoaches including our Palazzo. It was fascinating, very. But we weren't done until after 4, and we headed down the road with me driving and Ed supposed to navigate.

Which was impossible. Springfield Missouri was nine hours away and Springfield Illinois wasn't on our route. He figured that out quickly, and we kept heading south while he tried to make sense of my reservation.  Eventually we realized the error, so I asked him to just navigate toward St. Louis, and when my driving shift was over I'd get on the phone and try to fix the error.

Which I did, I think. I still haven't seen the refund for the non-refundable room, but the guy on the phone got us a reservation in Effingham Illinois, about 4-1/2 hours away.  The other mistakes made were me trying to do this on my phone without having pencil and paper and a flashlight available--he kept telling me numbers and asking for numbers and addresses and I kept having to switch my phone back and forth, looking them up and trying to remember them.

But he was very patient. For some reason I couldn't hear him at all when I put the phone on speaker, even when I turned the volume way up. Weird.

But we made it, stopped at Jimmy John's and got supper, and settled in by 9:00.  Note to self: eating JJs at 9pm is not a good idea. I woke up with nightmares more than once. Probably screaming in my sleep.