Time Zone: Eastern
Today's Weather: 76ºF, sunny
Length of Tour Stop: 6 days/7 nights
Next move: in 6 days
This is probably why we don't often drive at night.
On a day drive I'll start to notice fatigue and can predict that, in the next 45 minutes, I probably need a break. My bladder lets me know that it's considering sending up a flare at least 30 minutes before there's any actual urgency. I have plenty of time to call Jonathan, who after 17 years of driving the US interstates almost always knows the next "good" place to stop. We make a plan and execute it without panic, swearing, or tears.
Panic, swearing, and tears were all part of our nighttime arrival at the Walmart in Oak Grove, KY, where we'd planned to camp (for free!). The tears and panic were mine, because I had to pee so incredibly bad that I absolutely, one hundred percent did not believe that I was going to make it to a toilet without peeing my pants. In typical night-drive fashion my urgency went from "fine" to "nuclear threat" faster than I could get the Bluetooth to function, and then, because we were in the hills of Kentucky, there was no service. For 25 minutes I called and called and called. By the time it connected we were minutes away from the Walmart. As we drove into the parking lot I was quietly weeping, mostly out of fear that I'd end up on People Of Walmart with a smart-ass caption about peed-in pants.
Seeing the bubbly little figures marking the restroom ended my crisis. Jonathan, however, was out in the parking lot with the RV, and his crisis was only just about to begin. We'd been told to look for "the other trucks" in the parking lot, to group ourselves in with them for the night. The problem was, on this particular night, no other trucks had decided to overnight at the Walmart in Oak Grove.
I think for Jonathan it was like being invited to a slumber party with the cool kids and then showing up and realizing it was a huge prank and nobody else was coming. When I joined up with him after my joyous impersonation of Niagara Falls, I found him agitated, almost angry. I was befuddled as to what he found so upsetting. "So what if we're the only people sleeping in this parking lot?" was my thinking. "There's still security. It's still free. And, most importantly, I didn't pee my pants. So, really, this is nowhere near as bad as it could be."
This is another one of the troubles with driving at night: When you arrive at your destination it's 3am and you don't have access to all of your mental and emotional capacities for things like empathy and logic. I now understand that he felt we were extremely exposed and that when we woke at 9am it would be incredibly awkward to shower, etc in what would at that time no longer be an empty lot but rather a bustling public place full of shoppers. And I think I would have entered into those concerns if I hadn't been so completely exhausted/elated by the near-miss with my bladder.
There were arguments for trying to find a motel (see above) and there were arguments for staying in the parking lot (motels aren't free), but we were too tired to drive anymore, and that made the decision for us. Personally I slept absolutely fine and didn't really give a crap that there were a bunch of morning Walmart customers around us when we woke up. But I don't think Jonathan slept very well, and that made me really sad. It also wasn't a great foundation for a morning spent wrestling with finicky RV mechanics.
The RV, like the dogs, seems to be able to sense when we are stressed, and, also like the dogs, it reliably chooses those moments to kick up a fuss. When we arrived in the dead of night the on-board battery extended the slides (opening the RV out from its skinny driving width to its full living width) perfectly fine. But in the morning we found that this one act had completely and utterly drained the charge; we were powerless to slide it back in to driving width. This, needless to say, makes traveling completely impossible. Seeing as we did not want to camp for the rest of our lives in the Walmart parking lot, we needed to figure out a way to get the slides back in. In a coincidence that makes us look much more organized than we are, not only did we have the RV owner's manual with us, but we were able to find it almost immediately, after only a few small hissy fits per adult and dog.
Or . . .
As incredible as we both found it, and as much as we both swear that we remember personally putting jumper cables in at least one of the cars, somehow we did not have jumper cables. We stood there at the trunk of the Mazda and stared at the empty bin where we both thought they'd been. What do we do now? we thought. We need some jumper cables, we thought. We'd gladly give someone money for some jumper cables, we thought. IF ONLY THERE WAS A PLACE NEARBY WHERE WE COULD GIVE SOMEONE MONEY FOR SOME JUMPER CABLES, we thought.
And then, slowly, we turned our heads toward the sun. Not the sun in the sky. The one that blazes in little spikes next to the word "Walmart" on every one of their stores.
Maybe it was going to be ok.
Current Stats
Miles Driven with RV: 4020.5 miles
Days Lived in RV: 63 days
Camps Overnighted in RV: 10 RV parks, 1 Walmart
States Camped in RV: 7 (TX, AL, TN, IN, KY, IL, NC)