RV Road Gremlins Have A Wild Weekend

San Antonio, TX

If you look at the banner across the top of this page, you'll see links to the RV blogs I follow. Nick Russell's Gypsy Journal is my favorite. I try to read it every day. His latest post "A Bad Way to Start The Day", posted in the early AM today (Tuesday) captured the misadventures of some RVing friends out on the road on Sunday and Monday. It seems like the road gremlins were out doing their mischief big time.

Sunday was not a good day for my RVing friends. Al Hesselbart, retired historian for the RV Museum in Elkhart, Indiana, lost his transmission at a rest area on I-10 in Florida and couldn’t be towed in until Monday morning. And Greg and Jan White had a front tire blowout on Interstate 40 in Arizona and had to be towed to Prescott.

The gremlins chased us too over this past weekend while we traveled across Louisiana on I-10. We had a refrigerator problem that started on Saturday and couldn't get fixed until Monday. We used our GPS to get lost looking for a particular restaurant for breakfast. The coordinates were a half mile off and that put us a half mile down a narrow two lane road that took ten miles to find a spot wide enough to turn around. Later, while on I-10, an 18 wheeler blew a tire just as he was passing us. Threw alligators everywhere. Luckily none hit us. I did, however, pull off and do a walk around to check for damage.

This morning, I got an email from our workamping friends Bill and Alicia Koegler, who are on the road somewhere between Texas and Virginia, saying that they are down with Toad transmission problems.

All that got me to thinking about gremlins. How about some cartoon character to represent RV road gremlins? One that we can put in our blog posts to go with gremlin stories. That thought brought to my mind "Peter Pain". Remember him? He was the cartoon character in old Ben–Gay print commercials. He was a green gremlin with a derby hat representing the pain that Ben–Gay would cure. A few minutes of searching on Google produced these old images.

From there I used Microsoft Paint to produce this

Could he be our RV road gremlin? Does anybody have a better picture, a better gremlin, a name for this character?

We can have some fun with this. Respond with comments, pictures, suggested names and let's see where this takes us.