Oldies but Goodies, Volume One

I went back to the beginning of our travels and extricated a few short ones that introduce you to the Motorhome Madness way of driving around, particularly on our most unfavorite road around, that of Interstate 10. Here for your amusement (at our nerve-wracking expense) are some of those examples.

The first one is entitled Goin Down the Bayou and was published in the beginning of October, 2020 while on our first trip down here from New Jersey to Texas…….

Goin’ Down the Bayou

          I consider myself a fairly accomplished driver. I’ve been driving since 1972 and when I worked for Ritter Food and Sysco, I would routinely drive 1000 miles a week because of the size of my selling territory. Route 80 in rush hour and the screamingly busy New Jersey Turnpike were just another walk in the park to me. I have even driven a NASCAR race car at Pocono Speedway.

                A few days ago, (our second full day on the road) I experienced what was probably the worst and most stressful 45 minutes of driving in my life.

          Some sicko in the Louisiana DOT designed a highway that runs from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to Lafayette, Louisiana. It is Interstate Route 10. Running basically in a straight line following an almost perfect East / West tangent, it is elevated on a windy bridge above a giant swamp just high enough that you know that there would be no survivors if some idiot caused you to careen over the side.

          It ran for THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of miles.

          With itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny balsawood guardrails.

          And alligators underneath.

          I KNOW this is true because I’ve watched Swamp People.

          It’s two lanes wide and I needed to be in the right lane of what felt like it was being on the Jungle Cruise at Disney World except there was no humorous Guide to shoot the ‘gators and hippos as they charged the boat.

          When we finally hit dry land I thought, Phew! That’s over with!

          Nope.

          Another 14-mile Destruction Zone that had me feeling as if I was driving on the streets of Monte Carlo in the Grand Prix.

          Except their course is much wider and has easier turns than the road we were on.

          All of this in a 40’ motorhome dragging a 15’ trailer behind it.

Driving a vehicle this size in windy conditions, is like carrying a piece of plywood out to your car at Home Depot.

          In a hurricane.

          With only you holding on to the plywood.

          The term White Knuckle Driving was invented for situations like this. When it was over, I looked down at my hands and found out that there were, in fact, no knuckles left on my fingers.

           They were permanently imbedded in the steering wheel.

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The second one came a few weeks later, after we had been in Texas a while. We needed to travel to Durango, Colorado to drop off the trailer that contained my Library and a few other essentials that were deemed so when Paula had sold her home in New Jersey, and we officially moved into the motorhome. Colorado has a Relative Humidity of about 1% while Texas sports one of about 1000%….. so, the Library et al, were going to a place of Dryness…..

It is from the end of October 2020 and is entitled:

Westward Ho!

You know that it is going to be bad when even the GPS unit warns you there will be High Gusty Winds.

          I knew it was windy!

          I was driving!

          How did my GPS know it was windy?

          Did it sense my erratic driving style?

Could it tell by the many Lane Departure warnings she was giving me?

          At that point, I wondered if she had a DWI Warning built into her too! ( No worries there, I do not really drink except for an occasional Strawberry Wine Cooler maybe once a month.)

          Then I passed a sign that read, “High Wind Area”

          OK, now it made sense. Someone had programmed it in. We were traveling on Interstate Route 10 through southwestern Texas headed for New Mexico and eventually Colorado. This area of Texas is about as broad and expansive as any Texan could brag about. To complicate things, that Weather Anomaly that kept us from departing on schedule reared its ugly head once more, as if bidding us a evil, final, farewell.

           But we had Bluebird Skies and Bright Sunshiny Vistas!

          And Wind.

          Lots and lots of Wind.

          So not only were we in a High Gusty Winds Warning area, but we were still in the clutches of a departing Low Pressure System, which as it leaves, gets filled with an incoming High Pressure System that packs a Pressure Gradient that will knock your socks off! (in our case I guess you could say “tires off”). And unfortunately, it hung around for a while because Hurricane Zulu, Zorba, or Zumba (Can’t remember and don’t care) was still hanging in Louisiana and environs and wouldn’t let “our” system pass through!

          This made the previous drive through the Louisiana Bayou seem like just another Sunday ride on a Bike Path. (except there are no ‘gators in the Texas Desert, just a rattler or two). Remember how that previous drive went on for thousand and thousands of miles? Well, this one went on for millions and millions of miles!

          All day long, constant, no let up, save when we pulled into a rest area for a break.  At that point we could still feel the wind rocking us back and forth like we were on the boat with Jesus and the Apostles when the storm came up.

          Everyone knows the feeling of the Passing Truck on the highway.

          As the truck approaches and  pushes that big wall of air in front of it, you can feel it coming and you need to counteract that push by steering into it. The problem is that you need to stop that countermeasure the precise moment that the Wall passes you because if you do not, you will oversteer and only cause more problems.

          All of those issues are compounded by our size.

          I’m used to that by now.

          I watch my rearview mirror for the overcoming Big Rig and as it comes alongside, I steer into it until I feel the effect lessen and then I pull back to center and then steer the other way because now, as it passes, it wants to suck us in behind it.

          Got it!

          Been there. It is now all part of the Driving Experience.

Except when in the aforementioned High Gusty Winds Warning Area.

          Now it gets dicey.

          All of my carefully calculated, tried and true, driving techniques go out the window (literally and figuratively) when every maneuver that I make gets buffeted back and forth always in the wrong direction.

          I considered taking a Xanax but decided that it would not look good on the Police Report if they did a blood test. Poor Paula was as nervous as I was but made heroic efforts not to show it. You know how it is riding Shotgun, all of the drama and none of the control (slamming your foot to the floor in an effort to grind to a halt using your invisible imaginary brake on your side of the vehicle!)

          Miss GPS and Navigator Paula found an alternative way to go that not only promised to get us off of blustery Interstate 10, but it looked like it was even shorter! Off we go onto Route 285 North towards Pecos. I felt like I was in a Western Movie just hearing the word Pecos!         All was good until another Destruction Zone.

          They were widening the road (good) but in their efforts to do so they forgot to keep even the semblance of a shoulder on the right-hand side (bad). The road is only two lanes, one each way, so there was no riding in the left lane. The big issue with the No Shoulder scenario was that IMMEDIATELY after the white stripe on the right side there was NOTHING! Except a downward slope of freshly graded, sandy-type soil that would have flipped us over if I even thought about wandering over the line. It was so close to the edge I wondered how they even painted it onto the road. We made it into Carlsbad, New Mexico which is in the next time zone so theoretically we bought ourselves an extra hour to do with what we pleased.

          Sleep?

          How about Coma.

          Except we were so used to the constant motion of being shellacked all day long that when we finally stopped for the night and pulled into Walmart of Carlsbad, we felt like we had just gotten off an all-day rollercoaster ride.

          It took a while to fall asleep.

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And lastly for today is a short one about the ungainly shape of a Class A Motorhome and is from the same trip up to Durango. At this point we were traversing New Mexico and going through Roswell, the site of the infamous UFO sightings from the ’50’s. It is entitled:

Bugs or UFO’s?

Karen, one of your fellow readers, asked in the Comment Section if the spots on the windshield were bugs or UFO’s.

I’d love to report that they were UFO’s because that is a much more exciting story! But, alas, they are just BUGS.

It goes like this, a motorhome is about as aerodynamic as a shoebox. No, let me take that back. A shoebox is more aerodynamic because it does not have all sorts of appendages sticking out of it. The assortment of antenna, folded up awnings, TV satellite domes, and air conditioning units makes this thing like its dragging an anchor. But the number one reason for it’s ungainly shape is the FRONT.

It’s as flat as the proverbial pancake.

Which makes your chances (if you are bug) less than zero of surviving a meeting with it. In a car we’ve all witnessed the “Close Encounter” as a very fortunate bug gets swept up and over the car when it gets caught in the aero airstream instead of a “meeting of the windshield” event.

This NEVER happens with the motorhome. If you are a bug ANYWHERE in front of me, I will find you and SPLAT!!! I now have to clean you off the glass.

And soon.

Because what’s the fun of driving around seeing the country if your giant-vista windshield is covered with the “Remains of the Bugs” (to borrow a title from a like-sounding book.) So kids, keep those cards and letters coming and I’ll try to answer them when I’m not driving!

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That’s it for today, as usual I thank you for indulging me and reading these accounts of our travels. If you’ve read them before, an extra Thanks for re-reading and I hope that you have re-enjoyed them!