SharivilleLife stories from Shari

Good news and bad news.  Bad news, another glitch in our getalong.
Our truck has spent 2 days in sick bay.  This time it’s the lift pump.
Can’t begin to say how disappointed we are, but the good news is a
motto from Angie, “Never Give Up”.

We have to have a Guardian Angel riding with us, and we found a real
live Angel, named Michelle.  There we were standing in the driveway of
a cemetery with the hood up, and this very sweet lady stopped by to
see if we needed help.  Here we were in a strange little town in
Illinois, heading for St Louis when the fuel pressure dropped to 3 ,
Jerry immediately pulled off the road.  Michelle called around and
found a tow service and we took it to a Garage.  She drove up 30 miles
back up to our trailer and arranged for her father to come and get us
the next day and go to the garage and get things lined up.  All I can
say if you are going to travel with a diesel, take a suitcase full of
money with you.  So we now have a new fuel system.  And a rental car,
courtesy of the Pontiac dealer working on the truck.

Sure thing, Michelle’s dad picked us up at our trailer, mind you 30
miles from his house, and took us to the garage and while they were
working on our truck , he took us site seeing.  This kind gentleman,
Bill Hammons, turned out to be some kind of big wig for the city of
Alton where the garage is.   We got to see all kinds of things regular
tourists miss.  The town of Alton Illinois is at the confluence of the
Illinois and Mississippi Revers , and a couple miles south the Mighty
Missouri joins in.  Can you imagine the scenery around here?  In 1994,
I remember flying over this area on the way to Louisiana to visit
Angie.  I remember the captain of the plane calling our attention to
all the water on the ground.  We could see house tops only.  That
flood completely wiped out this little town.  It took 4 yrs to  put it
all back together.  He showed us the high water mark along the
buildings.  This is truly an old town with lots of beautiful brick
buildings and brick pavement.  He showed us the old area where all the
mansions are and some of them are pre 1861, pre Civil War.  They have
all the ornate gingerbread and wrought iron embellishments and
columns.  They have the lovely ornate iron fences.

He took us to a park in the middle of town, where there is a statue of
the tallest man ever, he was a member if this community and lacked one
inch of being 9 ft tall.  amazing.  He took us down to view the only
bridge of it’s kind in the world , the Clark suspension bridge.  Its a
cable stay bridge, fantastic.  Got lots of pictures of all of this.
We watched a tug boat pushing a huge barge upstream, all I could think
of was, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.  Splendid reading.

We wanted to take Bill to lunch, he would not accept anything for all
his trouble, so he took us to this really cool sports bar, and had
barbecue.  We returned to the garage , picked up the rental car and
headed back up to the trailer at Pere Marquette RV Park and our feline
family.  You will find these entries late because I’m having
difficulty getting out on the Internet form this park.  We also drove
to a Wal Mart and I developed 401 pictures.  I got to thinking , if I
somehow lost my camera my whole trip would be down the drain.  More
later.    Hugs, S and J.