Day 92 - Grease Monkey
Trip Start
May 19, 2008
1
94
161
Trip End
Nov 08, 2008
Mandeville,
Louisiana,
United States
Monday, August 18, 2008
Just after pulling out of the shopping mall car park and out onto the main road we passed through a set of traffic lights, and as Neil changed from second gear to third there was a clunk, followed by an "Oh no" (or similar!) from Neil before he veered across three lanes to get to the hard shoulder, which in this case was next to the outside lane! He knew exactly what had happened, the clutch cable had snapped.
Help From A Good Samaritan
This in itself wasn't too much of a problem, the fact that it happened on the bend of a major 3 lane highway, near a freeway intersection, in a busy district of New Orleans was another matter. We both quickly went to work, Neil changing into old "work" shorts and T-shirt by the side of the road, and Mel jumping into the back of the bus to get the spare clutch cable and tub of grease (you thought we were joking about all of our spares, didn't you?). Once Neil got under the bus and removed the old cable, he discovered that the cable itself hadn't snapped, it was the clevis pin that connects the cable to the pedal which was badly worn and had sheared. And that therefore presented a problem, as despite our vast array of spares, we didn't have a clevis pin. Just then a truck stopped on the shoulder on the opposite carriageway and a guy jumped out and asked if we needed help. He stayed with us for about 20 minutes, helping Neil make a temporary clevis pin out of a nut and bolt which they had to saw down to the correct size. And then his wife called and he had to leave to pick her up. Five minutes later another guy stopped to offer his help, but by that point Neil just had the greasing and cleaning up to do. All in all, it took just an hour to get us back on the road, and thankfully the weather stayed on our side, and the other traffic stayed off the shoulder despite a couple of tense moments when vehicles veered over the line towards us. After a brief stop-off at a large book store in a final attempt to find our camping guide, we went to McDonalds for a very late lunch.
You Picked A Fine Place To Break Down Chippie!
And it turned out to be the best McDonalds we've been in on our trip. It was clean, the food was hot and fresh and the staff were friendly with a sense of humour. We were so impressed we told the assistant who served us and she was so proud of the fact that she dragged the manager out of the back for us to tell her too! From McD's it was only a very short drive until we got ourselves onto the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway which took us north out of the city, across Lake Pontchartrain. A couple of miles onto the bridge, we looked back and saw the iconic view of the city that we all saw in the aftermath of Katrina, of the Superdome rising above the tree-line and the high rise buildings to the left of it. Again, a few sad memories were stirred.
After we passed mile marker 6 on the bridge we suddenly realised that the mile markers were counting upwards and the other side of the bridge was nowhere to be seen! After a quick consultation with the map, Mel estimated that it was about 25 miles long! At the centre of the bridge it was almost impossible to see land at either end. One thing that we could see however, was that the weather on the northern shore was significantly better than over New Orleans on the southern shore. The bridge was actually 24 miles long and has to be the longest bridge either of us has ever crossed. Thank goodness the clutch cable went when it did and not when we were on the bridge which had no hard shoulder.
Once on the northern shore it was only a short drive to our campground, Fontainebleau State Park. We hadn't been there too long before the rain caught up with us and we had to shut ourselves in for the evening. Our conversation turned to our experience of NOLA, what we had enjoyed and what we had been disappointed by. Mel said that she felt like she had somehow let down the people of NOLA by not having any photos of the devastation caused by Katrina to post on the blog. She pointed out that we hadn't been aware of the full extent of the damage caused and the impact that it had had on the residents and was still having to this day, and that most people in the wider world were probably equally unaware. She also said she was going to ask if we could have gone through the eastern side of the city, the worst hit area, this afternoon on our way out, but the clutch cable incident had taken that opportunity away. Also, tropical storm Fay is currently heading north through Florida and taking longer to do it than first forecast so it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to delay heading over that way for a couple of days. And so the decision was made, we would go back across the lake tomorrow and stay at a state park on the southern side of the city tomorrow night.
Miles travelled: 54
Total miles travelled: 8854
Days on road: 72
States visited: 15
National Parks visited: 11
