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Daily Didactic
We woke on the morning of our tenth anniversary on the road in unfamiliar territory, as we have two others. This morning it was in the pleasant, albeit humidly damp, Graham Cave State Park. We decided that a B&B would be a fair way to honor the day and it looked like a relatively short day of traveling would put us in Lexington Kentucky for the evening. We found a nice looking place on Trip Advisor and made reservations. We made a quick stop at the namesake Graham Cave, but have probably been forever spoiled by our Escalante Cave Arch.
We got the air moving again on I-70 and enjoyed a well running vehicle and an uneventful road for a few hours. We finally made it out of Missouri and crossed into Illinois late morning. We made an unintended detour from the freeway, down a couple mile road to Mt. Vernon Illinois looking for gas. It's one of those funny "a bit too far off the main road" stops we sometimes make in the bus, where you get a few more stares than normal. On the way out of Mt. Vernon the bus suddenly quit running of it's own accord and, as Theresa coasted into an empty parking lot, a faint poof of smoke came up from behind the dash. Really.
We walked a couple of blocks back into Mt. Vernon toward a fortunately nearby building that said "Auto Repair". Inside the shop was a small crowd of employees, who seemed nice enough but none of whom you really wanted to say "Volkswagen van" to. But we did. We arranged our third AAA tow in four days and had it in their shop in an hour or so. Brian found the problem in short order, the positive battery cable off the starter had not been tied away from the exhaust system and melted through, causing an impressive short that melted the negative lead right off of the battery. He was able to work with our newest mechanic, also a Danny, and both cables were replaced and safely secured free of the exhaust system in a few hours. The enthusiastically redneck crowd showed some typical southern hospitality and charged us 30 dollars for two hours of shop time and wished us well on our way.
Once again, we were on the freeway heading east, unfortunately three hours later than we intended. We swapped Illinois for Indiana and then Indiana for Kentucky. We skirted the very pretty Louisville, before rolling into Lexington four hours late. We'd missed another time zone change. We drove through some very uptown horse country, and eventually found the long narrow driveway to this evening's southern estate. We marveled at the day and remembered that Brian loves his wife very much.
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