Most RVers in December are heading south or storing their RV, but not Adrienne. She is heading for Harmonie State Park in Indiana. Piddle here, piddle there, but finally at 4 p.m. on Dec. 7 she’s off. Her first stop is at Quality Times RV Park in Mt. Vernon, Illinois. So far, so good except she couldn’t get hot water. She calls service in the morning. How many ways can you turn three bypass valves until you get hot water?
She continues down Highway 64 from Mt. Vernon and turns south at Carmi following the banks of the Wabash River toward New Harmony. New Harmony is one of those places that was out of the way a hundred years ago and is still out of the way. But people find it and pay tribute to its charm and uniqueness. Harmonie State Park is still open. Hiking trails are the attraction for Adrienne. In the evening she listens to CDs until the batteries die in the second act of “Carmen!”
She calls to report that the weather is OK, but a little cloudy and the house battery is dead. Sunday night the rain starts and continues for 14 hours. When she calls I comment “you are lucky it isn’t snow.” She replies: “I know. It’s cold here and the campground is almost flooded. I better get out of here before everything turns to ice.” But she did find the kill switch for the house battery.
The weather gets worse. I can imagine the tenseness of driving through snow driven by 40 mph winds and a wind chill of zero degrees. She calls. “I’m 27 miles from St. Louis according to the last sign. I didn’t stop over in Mt. Vernon. The motorhome is warm inside, except when I switch from heat to defrost. Then my feet get cold. I am at a rest area. I should be home in about an hour.” I felt like the guy in the light house trying to coax a ship to shore during a storm, except I got no light!
About 7:05 p.m. on the longest day, the Four Winds creeps down our narrow Kirkwood street. Adrienne deftly backs into grandma’s level driveway and just sits in the driver’s seat letting the adrenaline bleed off. I approach the motorhome, “Have a nice trip?” She replies, “Yeah, let’s go in and see mom and I’ll tell you all about it.”
“Mom” has traveled through 47 states since the 1950s in their 1954 Byerly trailer. The two veteran RVers talk about the adventure like it was just another trip. As for me, I was glad the ordeal was over, and I didn’t even go!
RVs create memories, some more vivid than others. Create your own memories in an RV from Byerly in Eureka, Missouri.
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Byerly RV, in Eureka, Missouri is the Priority RV Network dealer for the St. Louis, MO market. Byerly is a family owned company which was founded in 1948. Byerly RV is St. Louis’s only Top 50 rated RV dealer for the past 3 years! Byerly is truly the Center of the RV World.
CONTACT US:
636-938-2000
800-878-3325
295 East 5th St
Eureka MO, 63025
