This is Day 430 of 15 Days to Flatten the Curve. Deb and I are well this Friday evening.
We’re pretty pooped, actually, having just returned from a 300-mile cannonball run to Little Rock. We fetched — at Camping World, which we avoid unless absolutely necessary — a replacement cooling unit for our ailing fridge and brought it back to our campsite. The mission was, for the most part, incident-free.
A refrigerator cooling unit isn’t a small part. It weighs over a hundred pounds and the box it’s in was a couple of inches too long to fit in the bed of our rented truck with the tailgate closed. Camping World had no ratcheting tie-downs, so I scavenged the aisles and picked up an enormous cargo net and a hank of paracord.
The net basically contained the load, but the paracord was essential to securing it. So was my memory of the magical taut-line hitch I learned as a Boy Scout some 50 years ago — once lashed down, with the lines pulled tight, the box was solidly in place.
We stopped to check the load only once and it hadn’t moved a bit. Deb’s smooth driving through the rolling curves sealed the deal.
Our route today took us through and to places we had no plans to visit. We glimpsed a part of the Buffalo National River we hadn’t seen before and left the Ozarks behind when we reached the town of Clinton. (This may be Arkansas, but no, it wasn’t named for that Clinton.) We saw small and gritty whistle stops like Choctaw, Bee Branch and Toad Suck.
We passed a whole lot more Dollar Generals than we did McDonald’s. A bunch of Casey’s General Stores, too (pictured).
In the southern Ozarks, Deb saw her first “Elk Crossing” sign.
Putting aside the mission (and a necessary stretch of I-40), we judged it a trip worth taking. We enjoyed the drive, arriving back at Ernie around 4pm, road-weary but with the load intact.
We’ll probably find out tomorrow when the mobile RV tech will return to work on our fridge. It’s definitely a two-man job, meaning that he’ll have to schedule a helper.
In the meantime, we’re fine here. We’re running the fridge on LP while we’re around and awake. Strangely, it’s started chillin’ again.
We’re not fooled, however. It’s gettin’ fixed.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath
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