Day 4: Hot Brakes Smell Like Horse Manure
You know that road sign that shows a truck going down a steep incline? It means you’re about to go very steeply downhill. I never really paid attention to that funny sign before we started RVing. Heck, I never even knew what the little 2 and 1 on the gear shift meant in my car. Growing up around Houston, Texas, where everything is as flat as my chest was at age 11, you don’t need low gears. You don’t even need emergency brakes. Now that we RV, when we see that road sign, we make sure we’re buckled up tight, have the RV in a low gear, and have our noses at the ready.
Our first experience with Horse Manure Hot Brakes was actually in our old van. We came down off the mountain in Bar Harbor one day without incident, or so we thought. A few miles later, we all smelled a terrible stink. I kept looking around for a ranch because that’s what it smelled like. The smell got worse and we finally pulled over and called a tow truck. We didn’t find out until the next day what had caused the problem. We rode the brakes so hard that day that we did major damage to the van.
Last year we drove down a steep mountain in the RV and, even though we tapped on the brakes all the way down, we tapped them enough to make them hot. Just when we got to the bottom, we recognized the horse manure hot brake smell. We pulled over at a gas station, and let them cool off to avoid any damage. We didn’t think to use the low gear that day because, well, we’d never used it before!
Today, we saw the lovely truck-on-the-incline sign next to another sign that said “Use Low Gear.” What low gear? Did they mean those low numbers, 1 and 2, on the gear shift? Well, okay, if the truckers do it, I guess we can, too. Richard coasted down that mountain for what seemed an eternity, only needing the brake here and there. Hence, no hot brake horse smell (and no need to pull over and delay our trip). Yeah, laugh all your want but at least now we know what to do!
We had to stop at a store to stock up on groceries today. We split up. Richard went for the foodstuffs and I went for other items. The boys begged for a new movie for their DVD player so I bought them two. When we met up with Richard later, he had two movies as well so now the boys have four. They’ll watch them over and over again and, honestly, you can’t put a price on quiet in an RV when you have to drive several hours at a time.
We are in Pennsylvania now. I love driving through Pennsylvania! Mountains, glorious pines, farms, and quaint homes nestled in the trees along blue rivers with gentle rapids – it’s just beautiful…one of my favorite drives. The GPS tried to route us through the national forest but we’ve been that way before and the mountain highway is pretty harsh on RVs. So, we went the long way, through Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, heading for Allentown. Now I can’t get that Billy Joel song out of my head now! Heh…maybe now it’ll be stuck in your head, too!
UPDATE: 5:15 p.m. – We’re parked next to another RV with three occupants, a couple and their grandson. Max and Mason are beyond thrilled that they have a new playmate…until dark at least. His name is Thomas. It must be time to give Mason a haircut because Thomas just asked Max how old his little sister is.
August 11th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Growing up in Colorado, I really had to laugh when you described figuring out what the low gears are for. I guess I thought people were born knowing that!