“Yeah, they were supposed to remove that a few weeks ago…”
~ Joe, the kind NOCP officer who kindly, though impatiently, assisted us.
It takes a lot of planning to get us and the 5th wheel from one place to another without incident. And by incident I mean without pulling in to a gas station with a low canopy or finding ourselves at the end of a one way street with no way out. There’s a YouTube channel full of these sorts of incidents. Its our goal to never make prime time!
To help with this, we use an RV specific app for our routing, and I use google maps street and satellite views to look at parking lots and campgrounds just to make sure we can get in and out if there’s any doubt. But there are some things that just don’t show up on any apps or maps…
Having enjoyed Pensacola for a couple of weeks, we started out in earnest on our first cross country trip with the RV. Being a road trip, we wanted to take our time and hit some fun spots along the way. I’d booked a night at a brewery just outside of New Orleans and figured out a way for us to visit Cafe de Monde on our way through the city the next day. They have two locations and the one on the north side of town was in a park. Google maps showed a great parking area just a block away from the cafe. This was perfect! We could enjoy the brewery, sleep comfortably, get up and be at the park for a nice morning café with beignets, then be on our way to our next stop. Easy Peasy! I even called the park to ask about the parking lot. Satellite view showed temporary barriers, so I wanted to make sure we could get in and out and that there was, in fact, bus parking as the images showed. No problem, the lady says. It’s all good, come on down and enjoy the park! No low bridges, no dead ends, no U turns.
We hit a few snags on our way out of Pensacola, one I don’t remember, probably something to do with hitching up or loading the motorcycle, but the other was the power pigtail (the cord from the RV to the truck to operate the running lights and trailer brakes) was wound around the hitch and kept disconnecting with every right turn. This took several stressful miles to figure out. You really don’t like seeing your dash light up with “Trailer Disconnected” alerts while you are hauling down the highway at 55 mph! Anyway, between this and the other hiccup, we’d lost some time and we weren’t going to make it to the brewery for our Harvest Host reservation. Instead, we stopped at a trusty WalMart that allowed overnight parking.
No problem. We are adaptable. We could still visit the park and have our New Orleans treats, just a little later than planned. We didn’t have any firm reservations for several days, just a goal for how far we would drive each day to stay on our travel timeline. The drive was uneventful and we found the park with no trouble. Just like the lady on the phone said, we easily navigated into the bus parking area. We hopped out, locked up and set off to the cafe.
It was a lovely midday. Despite COVID, or maybe because of it, there were plenty of people out and about in the park, enjoying the nice cool February morning. We stopped and listened to a violinist, watched some ducks, and enjoyed stretching our legs. The coffee was strong, the beignets delightful, and we were on top of the world.
We mosied back to the RV and settled back in for the next few hours of driving. The exit to turn onto the main park drive from the parking lot was a little tight, but we managed without hitting any curbs or cars. To get out of the park, we had to drive along this one-way avenue past the cafe, over a canal, then around the round-about and we would be on our way. As we passed the cafe, and the last opportunity to take a different direction, we came upon the old sort of bridges you find in parks, with the pretty iron railings, and that go up steep for about 75′ then down the same distance, the sort that you can’t see the other side of until you are at the top. Up and over. No problem. We took slow, just to make sure we didn’t drag the bottom of the rv or that the hitch didn’t bind up. Vic was driving, watching the road ahead, I was watching the hitch and the view, noting that the cafe was really busy now.
He hits the breaks hard!
“What the hell is that!?!”
“We aren’t going under that!”
Tensions immediately escalated, vocabulary got colorful, confusion abounded.
There, straddling across the one-way one-lane road barely 75′ past the bottom of the bridge was a metal scaffold-like tunnel. With lights strung all around it. Not a built in, go under a mountain sort of tunnel. But a 10′ tall temporary light tunnel installed for some event. The sort of thing that doesn’t show up in maps or on apps. The sort of thing you cannot predict no matter what you do to make sure you have a good route. Road work, sure, understandable. Temporary detour, no problem. A warning sign telling you of a temporary hazard, ok-great, thanks! But a light tunnel? Oh, did I mention we are 13′ 6″ and there was no chance we were getting under that thing. Also no way around it since it spanned the entire avenue and there were trees and curbs and signs and other things on either side.
Yeah. We weren’t going to get very far this day, either!
Vic’s out there measuring, just in case our eyes were deceiving us. Meanwhile, I called the non-emergency police number and got transferred to the city parks police department. After explaining (at least twice) to the dispatch that we were a 55′ long 13′ 6″ truck and trailer stopped on top of the bridge outside of Cafe de Monde on Dreyfous Drive because of a light structure in the road, he agreed to someone to stop traffic for about a block behind us so we could back up over the bridge.
An agonizing ten minutes later, Officer Joe arrived and set up his cruiser so we would have plenty of room to back up. Now, if you’ve never pulled a trailer then you’ve certainly never backed one up, over a blind hill, with an audience. We certainly hadn’t! When we first got the RV we both practiced backing up in a big, empty, flat, parking lot. It wasn’t easy, but we sort of had it figured out. But that wasn’t this. This was nerve wracking. I positioned myself at the back of the RV with Vic driving, using the cell phones to talk to each other. He couldn’t see behind him and it was hard to tell if the RV was going straight back or not. Meanwhile, Officer Joe, wondered loudly how long this would take and did we know what we were doing.
Twenty long agonizing minutes later, and to a round of applause from the cafe, we were backed up and turned down the other street. Rattled, but also wanting to get the heck out of there and back to the known risks of Interstate 10 where there was no chance of a 10′ light structure impeding progress.
But wait. There’s more.
This new route we were on to get out of the park was not vetted. I’m pretty sure the ancient Live Oak trees lining the street claimed the radio antenna off the top of the RV. And I’m glad that’s all they claimed!
Yes, the beignets were worth it!
Where To Now 