On a warm, sunny, happy day, we cruised south through Illinois.  The engine was purring; we actually passed quite a few other vehicles, as we tooled along, listening to The Witching Hour, the Anne Rice book we chose to hear to brush up on the background of the Mayfair Witches, to help us with Blackwood Farm, the novel I had finally gotten around to reading after Diane had gotten it for me last Christmas.
    We were really enjoying the audio book.  Rowan was riding first class in an airplane, getting molested by Lasher, an invisible demon, and loving every minute of it, while Freddy was laughing and reminding us that Anne Rice had written soft core pornography before her Vampire Chronicles had catapulted her to fame, when suddenly, "Warummph!"
    "What was that?"
    "We dropped something," Freddy said.
    "What?"
    "What smells like rubber burning?"
    "That could be a tire."
    I pulled over to the side of the road and shut off the engine.  I checked the tires.  They were all fine.  Then I saw bright green anti-freeze dripping from the engine.  Did a hose burst?  I opened the hood, then swore a mighty oath.  One of the fan belts had ruptured in this old-style engine, killing the other belts with it and wrapping itself around the fan.  Great.  Stuck in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the afternoon with no chance of rescue.

    Dammit.  And the week had started so well . . .

    After the Milwaukee show, we had driven south to Berloit, that French town with the library that sucked, remember?  Their WalMart was quite convenient to the highway.  We slept late and drove a short distance to Starved Rock State Park in Illinois, a park with an interesting history, first as the site of Fort Louis, established in the days of Marquette and Joliet, and, from 1933--1942, as the sight of a C.C.C. camp.  Freddy got to learn a little first hand history, and catch a very big catfish, too.

    In the afternoon, we took a four mile hike around some of the parks many hiking trails.  "Do you really want to hike four miles?" I asked.  "This isn't the west, you know.  We're not going to see things like we did in Arches National Monument."
    "I want to see the falls," Diane insisted.
    She has apparently been a lover of water falls, cascading over rocks and mountains, from long before I knew her.  Maybe it has something to do with her first husband and Niagrara Falls, but I'll never know.  Anyway, we took the walk so see could see the beautiful falls at Starved Rock State Park.  Here she is, actually standing right on the falls:

    As you can see, summer is not the right season to see the falls at Starved Rock.  It turned out to be a pretty long, not particularly satisfying trip.  We did get to see Lover's Leap, but Diane just stood there.  Pookah had the easiest mode of travel:

    We had a happy day at the park, got up late, had a good breakfast--they had pancakes; I had Spam and Eggs, naturally, and hit the road at eleven am, plenty of time to make the WalMart outside of Columbus, a few miles from the first wholesaler we wanted to visit.  And that's when fate, and our beatup old camper, struck again.

    We did buy Sam's RV insurance, but they're pretty lame, really.  They pay for the service call, but we have to pay for the service.  They couldn't find anyone who would come out and put in new belts, so they radioed a tow truck, and promised it would arrive by four o'clock.  Four o'clock?  The car broke down at noon!
    "Dad, we have those extra belts in the carrier on top of the camper.  Shall I climb up and get them?"
    "Sure."
    I had no idea what I was doing.  Three belts?  Which ones went where?  Some must have gone to more than two pulleys.  Which ones?  I spent about an hour trying to match up numbers and sizes with belts that seemed to be close to the originals, but not quite.  I called Russ; he wasn't in.  Gary wasn't available, either.  Everything was up to me.
    We had two belts with matching numbers, but I couldn't get them on, because according to the way the belts were lined up, I had to install the last, belt, the missing one, first.  What could I do?  None of the other belts came close to fitting.
    Freddy came to the rescue without realizing it.
    "Daddy, it says 54 inches on this empty box."
    Fifty-four inches.  Maybe that was it!  Maybe it didn't go just from the fan to that other pulley.  The pulleys lined up--maybe it fit around both big pulleys and the little one.  I found a longer belt that might hit have fit, if the adjustment pulley wasn't so far away.  As I looked closer, I realized that the adjustment pulley could move about two inches.  I worked the wrench, half a turn at a time, until the belt got close to fitting, then had to go under the car to work the belt on the big pulley.  Would it stretch, even that little bit I needed?  Uh--I worked it over the edge--yes.  Yes, by God, it fits!
    Once I had that big one in place, the others were relatively easy.  Within a period of about two hours, I got it fixed.  We started the engine; it looked good.  I stopped right away, though, because the rubber sheath that protects the fan belt hadn't been bolted back in and the fan rubbed on it.  Just as I started to bolt it in, the tow truck arrived.
    "I can't tow a big camper like this," he said.
    "You don't have to," I said, bursting with pride.  "I fixed it myself.  Let the insurance guys pay for this one."
    "You had the belts?"  The repair guy was very friendly.
    "I think so.  Of course, I was just guessing.  I don't know which belts go where.  Do you think I did it right?"
    He looked under the hood, testing each belt for tightness.  "It looks like a perfect job to me."
    "Thanks," I said, beaming.  I had done it!

    We continued on the highway, after replacing a lot of the lost anti-freeze with water from the holding tanks.  After about a minute, Diane screamed, "We're overheating!"
    Oh no!  What now?  I pulled over to the side of the road.  Our heat sensor was reading 280 degrees.
    After waiting for a few minutes, I opened the radiator.  Perhaps I hadn't put enough coolant in there.  I started the engine again and left the cap off the radiator, while I made sure I filled it to the very top.  When I pulled out, onto the interstate, the sensor still read 280 and climbing.
    "Our new engine is overheating," said Diane.  "Are we going to crack the block?"
    "I don't know.  It says it's hot, but why isn't the radiator boiling over?"
    We were about half a mile from the exit.  We pulled off at a Shell Station and turned it off.  After about 40 minutes, the temperature was still at 280.  I didn't know what to do.  Finally, I decided we had to take a chance.
    "I think we blew out the heat sensor when the belts broke.  It's not overheating right now.  If it really was 280, it would be boiling over."
    "Are you sure?"
    "Yeah.  I asked that friendly truck driver over there from Naples.  We've got to try it."
    We drove awhile, and the longer we drove, the more I realized I was right.  The sensor must have been burnt out when we overheated.  I decided to try to make it to Columbus that night.
    On we cruised, the engine running fine, checking the defunct heat gauge to see if it hit the top--it was on the low side of high.  We continued into eastern Illinois.  According to Freddy, Illinois is famous for two things: White Power and White Castle.  We saw plenty of evidence of the former on the walls of bathrooms all over the state.  Because we were running late, we decided to buy fast food, so we hit the latter:

    Two ten packs of White Castles, fresh from the steamer!  Oh, bliss, oh joy, oh, how long has it been since we've tasted real White Castles, not the microwave kind in the plastic wrapper?  And the memories.  Does everyone have memories of White Castle hamburgers, or was I the son of a White Castle fanatic, a man who couldn't pass a White Castle anywhere in the Burrough of Queens.  One of my very earliest memories is stopping for White Castles after some forgotten trip to Manhattan, either to the movies to to visit relatives in Jamaica.  My father got into the car with a big bag of burgers, onions only, because he hated pickles, and passed me a small cardboard box that contained a square, wet, steamy bun, inside of which sat a tiny square of mystery meat, covered with little square chunks of onion.  I was a fussier eater than my father, so I think I made my mother scrap off the onions, a taste I had not yet acquired, then trepidatiously, I nibbled a small bunny bite on one corner.  I must have been about five years old at the time, and my reaction to that taste is gone, somewhere in the recesses of my memory, but I remember this: I, too, became a White Castle fanatic, raging whenever we passed a castle on the highway.
    I remember my mother, rest her soul, on the many trips to Manhattan, wearing her mink coat, all dressed up for a Broadway show--and where did we go for dinner?  Nedicks hotdogs before the show, White Castle burgers on the way home.  How many nights did she stand, refusing to eat, dressed for a fancy restaurant, while Dad and I sucked down those great Coney Island style hotdogs, topped off by Nedick's orange juice?  Then, as we drove home, there, on Hillside Avenue, stood Mecca, the beautiful White Castle that signified epicurian delights.  Mom usually just got coffee.
    Maybe our diet had something to do with the fact that I was prone to corpulence throughout most of my life.

    We got to the WalMart in Columbus at midnight, settled in, and slept late.  The next morning, Freddy and I installed a new heat sensor, and learned our guess had been correct.  The overheating had, indeed, blown the old gauge.  We went to Flower Time, picked up a few things, then, because the other wholesaler was about two hours away, we spent a pleasant afternoon at Delaware State Park, in Ohio.  Freddy got to go fishing, Diane got to do laundry, and I spent much of the day cleaning out the camper.  We all relaxed and slept late the next morning.
    We awoke to hear Freddy screaming at Pooka.  Pooka, who usually sleeps with him over the driver's seat, had urinated all over his Playstation.  Thank God, it was Playstation I and not Playstation II.  Freddy hadn't realized it had been peed on until he turned it on and the machine shorted.  We took it apart and dried it out, but it looked like the damage was done to the printed circuit.  It had a big black fried spot.  Needless to say, Pooka is now in the doghouse and will be there for quite awhile.  Here he is, being punished, while Double Champion Gidgie gloats:

    They had a pretty good price ofr firewood--$3.99 for all you could carry in one arm, so we loaded up.  We still have half a load tucked away with the generator.

    Monroe, Michigan, as most people know, is the home of General George Armstrong Custer.  I've always been interested in Custer--Has any other figure in American history been so glorified and so villified at the same time?  Was he a psychotic Indian killer, a brilliant soldier?  It all depends on whose viewpoint you read.  Freddy did a report on Custer a couple of years ago, and we've been to Custer State Park in South Dakota, as well as to the Little Bighorn National Memorial.  We didn't get to the museum in Monroe, but we did see Custer's statue in the center of town, right by a big ad for the cat show that was draped over main street.

    Okay, we make it to the show hall at the required time, six pm.  Several other vendors (too many of them) are unloading their wares.  I park in the back, giving myself maybe a forty-five foot walk to the back door of the showhall, while other vendors, like old ladies in a shopping mall, are jamming their cars together at the door, so they won't have to walk an extra two feet to the doorway.
    And what happens?  I get told to hurry up because other other vendors need room to get their trucks in.  Three times, I am asked, "Are you unloaded yet?  You need to move that camper," when it is completely clear that I am in absolutely nobody's way.
    The next morning, after I moved the camper off the concrete so there will be more parking spaces for the specators, I am asked THREE TIMES to be sure to move the camper off the concrete.  I am not happy with this show.  They are celebrating their 250th show today.  I do not plan on being here for their 251st.  I used to say, based on my travel obervations, the nicest people in the country I've met seem to be from Michigan.  I guess I need to amend that.  I've met lots of nice people all over the United States this summer, some of them right here in Monroe, but the people running this cat show are not among them.
    I do not expect to do well as this show.  We do have some good higher end stuff that could make a difference, but there are too many giftware vendors.  I count six, all of which have similar and in several cases, the same items we carry.  The table cost $150, making it the highest of the summer.  We have, this morning, sold about half the cost of the table, certainly a good start, but I don't see much of that gate coming through the door.  The parking lot is full of exhibitors, but where are the spectators?  Time will tell, I guess.

    Freddy had a great time at the show.  He fished all day Saturday, at a river just next to the sports center.  On Sunday, he got to watch several hockey games.  We didn't seem to be selling as well as we expected, but now that we're carrying some higher end stuff, the first day's take was still over $200, so we weren't doing too badly--much better than our neighboring vendors.
    We got permission to spend the night in the parking lot.  It didn't realize until the next day that the parking lot had train tracks on both sides--very active train train tracks, I might add.  I don't know how many times we woke up to the noise of those trains--I began to feel like I should be watching a minority boy stabbing his father thru the windows of the passing train, like in "Twelve Angy Men."

    Rocinante's fan belts were getting noisy.  When I checked them out, I discovered that the bolt that held one of the smog pumps (whatever they are) had fallen out completely.  I bought a bolt that seemed like the right size, then took the fan cowl off again, found it didn't fit after all, had to put everything back together, drive to the store, then take everything off again to reinstall the other bolt.  It took most of the day on Sunday, then, when we drove off, it seemed noisier than ever!

    There was some good news, though--we came in ten dollars less than a $400 show.  Packing up took quite awhile.  I had a bit of a stomachache after eating one of the free donuts provided by the cat club.  Later on, I must have strained my back carrying some of those heavy boxes of merchandise.  As we drove off, south, towards Florida, I thought, great.  Now I have a backache and a stomache, and to make matters worse, my urine in brown!  We figured it must have been due to that cheap whiskey I drank the other night.  Well, the trip was nearly over.  Our next show would be in Orlando, and we could take our time getting there.
 
 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN