Day 2 - Travel to Nashville

Wednesday, June 7, 2023
Posted from: Nashville North TV Park, Goodlettsville, TN
Miles driven: 450
Total trip miles: 691

Matt and I got up early. Matt drove into Hannibal to pick up parts to replace the truck’s front brakes. The store opened at 7:30am, so he was tearing the truck apart by 8:00am and we were on the road by 10:30am. 

^Matt is talking Cameron through a few steps. 

It took 1:20 to change out the front brakes with his trusty bottle jack, and another hour to bleed the lines on all brakes, pick up, and take a shower. But that’s not the real miracle…the real miracle is that the part store gave him the right parts the first time. Whew. We used up some good karma on that one. 

We had the watchful eye of these two, so it was unlikely any mistakes would be made. 


This campsite. So crazy. It was hard to get all of it in a picture, but it starts where the gravel first changed to a lighter color at the bottom of the picture, and goes another full truck length in from of the camper. We’ve never seen anything like it. We could have fit three of our 30’ camper and truck set up on this site!


It had a nice fire pit area off to the side. Caleb found boxes in their recycle bin for Matt to lay on under the truck. 


As if we needed confirmation that no one listens to Mom…the passenger mirror is now missing the little cover piece where it connects to the truck. I saw it fly off when we were going down the road yesterday. I said something about it, and everyone was like, “You did? I didn’t hear you.” Except Caleb who said, “Oh yeah, I remember you saying that, but I didn’t know what you were talking about so I just didn’t worry about it.” So anyway, this is missing…if anyone cares or whatever. 


After all this, we still had a fairly long travel day to Nashville ahead of us. 

This interesting and very large (2 stories or so) statue of Mark Twain holding his cigar was at the entrance to the campground. So there’s that. 

To leave the campground, you pretty much had to make a U-turn while pulling out onto a very busy four lane divided highway. Well, our hitch does not like U-turns. So as we made the turn, a torsion bar popped off and we drug the whole thing chains and all down the highway until it was safe to stop, which was never as this highway had wimpy shoulders, so we made an unsafe stop on the highway to put it back on. Not great. 

Whether Matt had a premonition or what I don’t know. But he wore his bright orange Buck Buck Moose! shirt today, so that made it mildly more safe. (I didn’t even know he owned a bright orange Buck Buck Moose! shirt, so that was also fun.)

Since the torsion bars have now appeared in two vacation stories, I offer this stock image of what I am talking about for reference. The bars hanging down on either side with the words EAZ-LIFT held by the chains on the left side of the picture are what I am referring to. We now have one zip tied to the hitch. I can feel your judgement…

St Louis was a downpour. 



A funny screen shot of our truck (I always switch the vehicle to the green truck in Google Maps while we are on vacation), driving down the back alley behind the gas station to get to the diesel truck pumps. It was such an odd set up. 

Story time: Last fall someone backed into our camper at the camper storage lot. It ruined the large outdoor kitchen door. The door was replaced in February. (Let’s hope this never happens during camping season as it took several months for the new door to arrive from the factory.) 

Fast forward to today. Matt noticed one of the outdoor kitchen door latches had come undone and was catching a lot of wind. Thankfully, we were close to an exit. 



We pulled off and got the tools out. Nothing was broke, but the teeny tiny screw with no more than four threads holding the latch on had oddly loosened allowing the door latch to pop open. Who could have ever imagined that would occur with a beast of a screw like this little guy?? Hmm…



We arrived at our Nashville campground at 6:45 CT. Cameron talked us into going out for pizza. Matt forgot to pull a beer from the outdoor kitchen fridge and put it in the main fridge, so he had nothing but cool-ish beer, so he wasn’t hard to convince. (The outdoor fridge is the beverage fridge because it only runs on electric and doesn’t switch to gas to run while we are going down the road like the main fridge.)


By now it was 8:30 and we had closed the pizza place down on a Wednesday night. We are so cool…


Our chauffeur, Cameron, drove us home (part of the deal was that Dad didn’t have to drive since he had done his share today). 

Good night!