Hilary's Blog - US Trip No. 3

Well, where do i start with our tale of woe?

Here we are back in the States for another seven-week visit, during which we will be exhibiting at The Backer Pet show in Chicago, the American Holistic Veterinary Congress in Cincinatti, the Equine Extravaganza in Virginia, and finally the Equine Affaire public show in Springfield, MA.

We arrived at our usual first night stop, the Holiday Inn in Quakertown PA and it was like deja-vu because there was a violent storm going on with eight inches of rain falling in under 12 hours! We had visions of a repeat performance of the horrendous storms we had experienced earlier this year!

Well, the weather improved but our luck certainly didn't. We were due to collect our RV and start driving to Chicago, but discovered that the RV company had ordered a recall on our rig, so we had to delay our departure, while a motor in the RV was replaced.

We finally set off on Saturday 2nd October on the I-80, this is an amazing road that runs all the way from New York on the east coast, right across the country to San Francisco on the west coast. It must run for at least 3000 miles! We travelled through Pensylvania, Ohio, Indiana, (past the factory that made our Keystone Raptor ‘toy hauler'), and on into Illinois heading to the north of Chicago.

During the last 100 miles of the drive our truck had started to lose power and we thought we might have picked up some dirty fuel. So at the moment we are sitting in a Ford dealership in Marengo, just outside Chicago, while they change the two fuel filters that had become blocked!

In addition to the problems with the pickup, the work that had been done on the RV before we left had not been done correctly, and, as a result, the legs that drop down at the front of the RV when you unhitch it from the pickup, had become bent, which meant that we had to call in a mechanic and wait four hours while he sourced replacement parts and fitted them.

Let's just hope that this hasn't set the tone for the rest of our trip and that things improve from now on! Stayed tuned for more adventures of Hilary and Tony in the Herbmobile!

The 'Herbmobile'