Chattanooga and St. Louis

We completed our 380 mile driving day from the Savannah area to Chattanooga, and then another 450 mile repositioning into St. Louis last weekend. Time on the road was mostly uneventful, except for a potentially scary encounter in Atworth, GA (just north of Atlanta).

Moving from Savannah to Chattanooga

We had pulled off I-75 in search of re-fueling, but couldn’t make it into the station we were aiming for. After getting ourselves turned around in a suburban neighborhood, Chris made a right hand turn onto the overpass to get back on the interstate. There were 3 lanes to move over to the left to make the ramp onto the interstate, but no problem – all lanes were clear, and the light at the intersection was red for the flow through traffic.

As Chris was moving into the 3rd lane – the light turned green. A SUV driver decided to try to gun it past us on our left, but got irritated when we overtook the lane before he could – we already had our signal on and were already well committed to the lane change.  So to vent his frustration, the driver speed up on our right side, then moved into our lane and abruptly stopped at the now red light in front of us. Thankfully we were already stopping for the light, and got to a safe stop.

But shiesh dude, you could have seriously gotten yourself rear ended **BY A BUS**!!!!  These things aren’t as agile as your little SUV!

At any rate – he gets out of his SUV, slams the door shut and starts yelling at us in the middle of the road! I check the lock on our door, as this guy is clearly not in a stable frame of mind – and we make apologetic gestures of ‘we’re sorry.. we didn’t mean to cut you off’.  But he’s not letting down, and his posture is quite threatening at this point… and um, dude, have I mentioned we’re in a 24,000 lb BUS that can CRUSH you??

At this exact moment a sheriff’s vehicle swooshes up our left side onto the median. The sheriff gets out, and gets right into the face of our new ‘friend’. He gets him calmed down and seated back in his SUV.  *whew* So often you wonder where the law enforcement is when you need them, and here we are so blessed that they were exactly there when we needed them. Otherwise, this situation could have turned really ugly.

After calming the situation down, the sheriff comes to our bus window and explains that he was right behind us and witnessed the whole thing. He explains that while we may have technically cut the guy off (but understands we were already committed to the lane change in a non-agile large vehicle trying to get ahead of the traffic), the guy’s reaction was absolutely inexcusable. He took Chris’s driver’s license, and came back a few moments later to let us know he was going to have some final words with the driver and then we’d all be free to go.

When  he came back to us, he profusely apologized on behalf of the city of Atworth for our negative encounter, and wished us well on our trip.

And we profusely thanked him for being there and handling the situation in a very friendly and professional manner.

We left Atworth with a smile on our faces, and extremely alert.  We found a fuel station we could get the bus in, topped off the tank and then made the final miles into Choo Choo Express Garage – our favorite bus mechanic.  We had called ahead, and they had a power cord waiting for us in the parking lot.

Chattanooga

Our primary reason for stopping in at Choo Choo was because at our last maintenance in August, Joel (our genius amazing mechanic) discovered that the previous patch welding job on our exhaust manifold was failing. As it is cast iron, Choo Choo doesn’t have the welding equipment to do another patch. And we couldn’t track down a new (old) one for a 8v71 at the time to replace it, but he gave me enough information to start a search (re-assuring me that this wasn’t yet a critical issue).

I had been following the bus forums at Bus Conversion Magazine, and encountered someone parting out a 8v71 – and agreed on $100 for the exhaust manifold.  That had arrived way back in October, and we’ve been toting the thing around since then.

Turns out, I tracked down the exact right part! Joel was able to quickly get it replaced for us. Score for this bus babe. (Chris says I’d get more bus babe points if I had installed it myself.. but come on, let’s not go getting crazy here. At a very reasonable $65/hr – I’ll happily pay Joel to do it right.)

We also wanted Joel to give Zephyr a thorough safety inspection before we headed out west – however there was another bus stuck on the pit awaiting a part. No worries for us, we had plenty of stuff to attend to while parked in their lot for the day, and we’re on no schedule.

I went deep on some work projects, including processing maps for the next update to our app Coverage? and some major edits on our ‘The Mobile Internet Handbook‘ eBook (releasing NEXT WEEK!!). And Chris went to work installing new switches on the driver’s side dash. The switch for our headlights had gone out last summer, making them unusable. Which generally isn’t a problem as we don’t tend to travel after dark anyways. But – we have headlights again, and don’t need to worry about any of the other switches failing anytime soon.

On Friday morning, we were able to pull Zephry over the pit. Aside from an air valve that needed replacing – everything checked out most excellently. We left Choo Choo with our smallest bus maintenance bill yet of just $200, well worth it for the reassurance that everything is in tip-top shape.

The other cool thing about this stop over was that long time readers (and future full timers), Bruce & Yvonne, reached out to invite us out to dinner. In all our recent stops in Chattanooga, we had never taken the time to get out and do things outside of the garage. So we were very thankful for the excuse to go downtown and explore. We had a wonderful dinner talking about full timer stuff with new friends, and then they gave us a walking tour of downtown.

Hopefully our next meetup with these two is out on the road!

St. Louis

We’re really quite anxious to get off the east coast, as it’s been 2 years since we have been west of St. Louis.

We had contemplated routing through Evansville, IN where we have several friends – both fellow RVers and fellow bus nuts – but opted to just drive on. We made a direct beeline and knocked out a lot of miles on Friday. We ended up overnighting in a WalMart parking lot in Marion, IL – and had a great Thai dinner in the strip mall nearby.

On Saturday morning, we made the final 3 hour drive into St. Louis – stopping along the way at a state park to dump our holding tanks. We’re finding that we can comfortably go 10 days without needing to dump our tanks (with no water conservation methods), and we were at day 7. Knowing we were going to be without sewer access while courtesy parked with family in St. Louis – we wanted to start off with the tanks empty.

We took Route 3 into St Louis, and arrived to Chris’ parents house in time for lunch.

Not much exciting to report from St. Louis this visit. We’ve been mostly busy with work related stuff supporting our clients and hanging out with family. Chris’ folks now winter in Florida, so they had just recently returned to St. Louis themselves. We helped them with some labor of opening up their pool for the summer – a very messy job! And we got a Trader Joe’s stock-up fix.

And there’s been a lot of work on the new mobile internet eBook to get it ready to launch next week. Aside from polishing the content, continuing to expand it and preparing supporting graphics for marketing the book – we’ve been deep in research on formatting it for Kindle and iBooks too. We’re very excited about the eBook – as it’s coming together to be quite the comprehensive guide to this complicated topic. Keep tuned, we’ll be launching it early next week!

We did take a break last night and caught a Cardinals Game at Busch Stadium – which had a very exciting 8th inning.

Up Next..

Sometime in the next couple days we’ll be hitting the road westward, where a stop in Kansas City is looking likely. We are greatly looking forward to it, as it’s been a very long time since we’ve crossed through the gateway of St. Louis.

We’re currently contemplating our routing options from here to Portland, OR for the World Domination Summit in early July. As we have a month to get there, we are considering following some version of the Lewis & Clark Trail, which would take us through the Dakotas and Montana. Somehow following the Corp of Discovery’s path on our way to world domination seems appropriate.

If you have routing ideas, we’d love to hear them! We’ve gone across I-80 before, and we love exploring new areas to us.