On the Banks of the Ohio

We left home Monday, went northwest into Alabama, crossed the Appalachian spine, and descended into Fort Payne, Alabama. We’re headed for the Great River Road in the MN/WI area and more.We left late in the day and stayed at a nice overnight park in Fort Payne. On Tuesday morning we were set to head north on I-59 to I-24 and our destination of Paducah, KY. Irene wanted to see the National Quilt Museum. Our coach has been performing beautifully for quite a long time which made us nervous. Sure enough when we started up Mont Eagle we had a drastic power loss and topped the mountain doing 25 mph. We figured the worse –the turbo probably failed. First we tried changing out the fuel filters at a TA truck stop just south of Nashville but that did not help. We went to Cummins engine in Nashville but they couldn’t look at the problem until the next day and we could not overnight in their lot. George then recalled a Country Coach owner we had met at Florida Grande RV resort several years back and remembered that he had a truck repair business in Nashville. Bob Link owner of Link Automotive was very hospitable to us and promised to look at the problem the next day even though he had one diesel mechanic out. He also offered us a 30A hookup for the night which sealed the deal. The next morning the mechanic spotted the problem even before we got in the shop: a broken charge air pipe clamp. We couldn’t be luckier to have such a simple fix. Luck was with us except that we were struck with the second episode of RV’er’s woe that night at the shop when George turned on the diesel HydroHot. Instead of lighting it ejected raw diesel fuel from the exhaust. Bob called a certified HH mobile service tech for us but he was not available soon enough. We needed to get back on the road. We figure since we’ll have hookups on this trip we will not need it and can repair it ourselves when we get home. We took one day out of our itinerary, rebooked the affected reservations, and continued on to our original destination of Paducah, KY. George bummed around town on foot while Irene visited the National Quilt Museum which was excellent.                                      Paducah is a pretty little tourist town with nineteenth century buildings and architecture. The Illinois Central Railroad once had a major repair shop here, but it closed in 1950. Also in the 1950's the government built a nuclear processing facility that doubled the size of Paducah.          George spent most of the time sitting on a bench under a shade tree on the bank of the Ohio river enjoying the cool breeze off the river and gazing at the occasional barge tug.          Our destination tomorrow is the Peoria, IL area after which we will enter the Great River Road area.