When the GPS Turns Against You

I just need to start with this saying…..What a week we have had.  Thanks for joining every Saturday.  

I had a great day with Katie (my niece) the day before we left Austin.  That was wonderful for me as I really do not know the next time I will be seeing her this year. We had so much fun getting these beautiful permanent bracelets together at Nina Berenato Jewelry Store.  Please check out her website.  So incredibly beautiful and unique and philanthropic.

Had lunch at our favorite taco place, The Velvet Taco in the Domain area of Austin. Just had the best time together!! 

We will be on the East Coast the rest of the year and will not be going to CA for the holidays.  Which means, I don’t know when I will be seeing Katie, or Mikey and Kelly either (my nephew and his fiance’). We are going to try to get home for Mikey and Kelly’s engagement party in July. Flights for that time are crazy right now out of New England.  Fingers crossed I can find something.   My sister, Betsy is trying to join us in Bangor, Maine in September too, but it all depends on flights.  

That’s the tricky part of this lifestyle, for sure.  As I keep saying, it’s the lifestyle we have chosen for right now and we will make the best of it.  

After Austin, we are on the way to Indiana to get the RV worked on.  We have 5 stops along the way to arrive in Elkhart, IN on March 20th. Our first stop was a city called Caddo Mills, TX.  No reason, other than the convenient RV park off the highway.  When I plan our travel days, I use the RV Life Trip Wizard program. I have found it to be the best RV trip planner.  Once the trip is planned, then it uploads to their app to use their GPS, only this time, we ended up in a bit of a pickle.

All of a sudden, the GPS program would completely turn off when we pulled off the highway for gas or a rest stop.  It started to say, “re-routing” and then just completely turned off.  Ok, that wasn’t a complete melt down issue as I would just turn it back on.  This actually started on our drive to Austin, so I just figured there was something going on with the app. I tried the ol’ at home IT trick of logging out and logging back in, but that didn’t work.  I figured I would check it out once we arrived in Caddo Mills and reach out to technical support.

Let me also say that the night before each of our trips, we check the map to confirm the route.  I also check other GPS programs to confirm.  We use the Trucker App!  As I have said, if a semi truck can drive a route, so can we.  

For this trip, I didn’t check the trucker app as it was a pretty straight shot to the RV Park.  Nothing unusual, just straight on the highway, then get off and turn left and the park was right there…..except……. The GPS took us off the highway much earlier than it showed on the map and had us turn left almost 2 miles before the road I was told to turn from the host at the RV Park.  Of course, I figured there was construction or an accident and it was taking us around.  NOPE!!!!  When we turned left, there was an overpass that was way too low for us and Jerry had to slam on the brakes before we tore the entire top of our RV off.  

Let me confirm with you that the GPS programs we use ask all the important information about our vehicles.  Height, weight, etc.  Our RV is 13.7 this overpass was 13.5!!!   Why this happened, we are still trying to figure it out with technical support.

Jerry had to get out of the truck and direct traffic so we could back up and go another way.  Thank goodness there was an amazing guy who pulled over and helped us.  There are still quite a few awesome people out there!!  

The thought of what “could have happened” is just too much to think about quite honestly.  Jerry had nightmares that night, I can assure you.  All I know is that our full-time rv life would have been over for quite a while if not forever.  

Needless to say, for Jerry, that was a 3 beer night.  I had a glass of prosecco and we took a nice long walk, after we set up, to shake off some of the nerves.  The Dallas Northeast RV park was lovely for a one night stay.  

Unfortunately, this story is not over.  The next day we drove to Little Rock, AK to stay at a working farm called St Joseph’s Farm.  Again, I was told it was right off the highway.  This time I did have both the Trucker App and the RV Life App going at the same time.  However, when we got off the highway, I turned off the Trucker App as it looked like we were completely safe and going in the right direction.  How wrong was I!!!!  

Once we got off the highway, for whatever crazy reason, the GPS took us through a residential neighborhood.  We both looked at each other and said, is this some kind of joke???  Are we being punked?  Not only was the neighborhood narrow, but there were cars parked along both sides.  People were watching us from their porches, shocked! (looking back now, we laugh at some of their expressions)  We were shocked. Jerry did an amazing job getting us through there.  I did not scream or whimper, I promise you.  I was trying to keep calm for Jerry.  Once he got us through, we both about lost our #$#$@.  

I immediately emailed the GPS support team and let them have it.  They are still trying to figure out what’s going on.  Trust me we are using 3 different GPS programs moving forward until this is sorted out.  And, I learned my lesson not to turn off any other directions until we are safely parked.  The sad thing is that I hear these stories on all the different programs that are out there.  RV Life is supposed to be one of the best and so many RVers use it.  I will get this fixed as most of you know me.  This is STILL not the end of this story, though!!  

To make things even more interesting, St Joseph Farm did not have a level site, so we could not auto-level the RV which means we could not bring out our 5 slides and we kept the truck hooked up to the RV.  That means, we did not have access to our kitchen or living room.  Thank goodness we do have access to the bathroom and bedroom.  Of course, we could not bring out the bedroom slide and had to crawl on the bed.  But, that’s ok, we were able to watch TV and get a good night’s sleep.

Even though we did not have a lot of food in our cooler, (I always pack food for our travel days) the farm sold us some sausages, we had veggies in the cooler, and Jerry fired up the Blackstone and grilled the sausages.  We ate our dinner outside on a picnic bench in the beautiful St. Joseph’s Farm looking at the goats, cows, and gardens.  Not all was lost!  

The next day we drove to West Memphis, AK where we stayed at Tom Sawyer’s RV Park right on the Mississippi River.  It is lovely.  We stayed for 4 nights.  Thank goodness the GPS had no issues other than turning off when we stopped to get fuel or a rest stop. I just received an email this morning from the company that they moved my issue to an upper tech support person.  I know, I know, I’m special!!!! 

Finally, we had a blast being complete tourists at Graceland while staying in Memphis! In the 8.5 months we have been traveling, this is the first really touristy thing we have done.   We took a tour of the home of Elvis and all the different museums dedicated to him.  What an amazing story and tour this was.  This is a must see if you are in Memphis!!!  Highly recommend it!  

Heading to Indiana through Missouri and Illinois!  The adventure continues! 

Just One More….GPS program (you can never have too many)