The Hitch in Our Plans Is Our Hitch

An hour into our first big day of travels this year—first destination Big Bend National Park, woohoo here we go!—we heard clunking behind us and pulled over casually, just to make sure it was normal clunking. It was not normal clunking.

This is what we saw as we stood there on the shoulder with cars pulling around us. See the way parts of the hitch on the left are connected? And see the way parts of the hitch on the right are not connected? That is a big problem.

Tracy grabbed the hitch manual, rummaged around for a bit, then called the hitch’s hotline. (Flash back to the early days of travel when the VP of the hitch company talked me through a bad hitching day.) This time the president returned Tracy’s voicemail (on a Sunday) and suggested we get off the road to somewhere safe, then order the offending bolt to be shipped to us overnight.

The good news: We were able to slowly, carefully drive five miles to this RV park under a bridge and grab a pull-through spot, seeing as how we dare drive forward but don’t dare back up. The bad news: As soon as Tracy started disassembling the hitch here, turns out the offending bolt is actually an offended bolt: various connecting parts were corroded and weak, and when we made turns that put pressure on them they weakened even more and bent, putting pressure on the bolt, which snapped. And that put pressure on other parts that bent and broke, and now we have a lot bigger problem than one broken bolt. It’s quite the bolt to snap in half, though, isn’t it?

After a very busy two days of figuring out what parts we could get shipped to us from the hitch place, how much that would cost (they are heavy) compared to what we’re paying here in this RV park to wait for them, then being duped by Evil Camping World with a ghost substitute hitch, we gave up.

Today, Tracy’s installing an interim hitch, which will get us the 60 miles back to near Austin where our friends are still staying. We’ll order all the broken parts for our old hitch and Tracy will rebuild it. That’s how much we appreciate this brand of hitch, despite my previous hatred. It truly is a safer hitch (when assembled), and it’s worth salvaging.

Goodbye Big Bend. We will shuffle the rest of the summer plans as little as possible.

The Oldest Working Dance Hall in Texas

If you’re still with me here, I’ll offer some stories from this odd place we limped to after the breakdown.

We’re near a faux small town called Gruene (pronounced like “green”). It was founded by a German guy and his family as a cotton town, but boll weevils wiped out the crop, then the Depression wiped out the rest of the economy, the interstate bypassed it, and it was a ghost town by the 1970s. That’s when an architecture student worked to get the cotton gin (I think) listed as a historic landmark, then developers bought the rest of old buildings and turned it into a historic tourist spot, kind of like a mini Williamsburg.

We had lunch in the old cotton gin, which has been cleverly turned into a giant tourist restaurant full of architectural wonders. I didn’t take more photos because I was at risk of being run over by a kazillion staff people at all moments.

We had beers at the oldest working dance hall in Texas, where a constant rotation of bands play on the stage to gawkers, kind of like downtown Nashville, just one band at a time on one stage.

We would have stayed longer, but our band wasn’t so hot and the layout was for dancing, not sitting, reasonable enough.

It was nevertheless a cool place to find, and it made me think of the dance hall my Cox grandparents ran in Richmond back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. I found a Facebook thread about the place (named Tilly’s only because my grandfather found that sign; my grandmother’s name was Estelle) that claimed it had the smoothest dance floor in Richmond. Gruene’s dance floor wasn’t so smooth. What a flashback to think of that place. Very strange that I hadn’t thought of it in like 40 years.

All the buildings in Gruene are either old or made to look old, even the new homes in neighborhoods. Again, I would have taken photos, but there were so many tourists (like I’m not one) that we had to park out of town and brave the crosswalks and a shuttle bus. Just as well; every business is a tourist business, and every business has a name that’s a play on the word “green.” Utterly annoying. I guess that does the trick in getting people to pronounce it the way locals want, though.

Our shuttle bus driver was keen for us to tour three abandoned Airstreams his boss has sitting in the shuttle lot, open, one with a broken window from them letting a band stay overnight (or maybe the shuttle driver did that, he was a character), all with tons of potential but just sitting there uncared for.

Jeez Louise what a weird day. We began it by saying goodbye to friends, middled it with a breakdown, ended it with a strange fake town and three sorry Airstreams.

I really wish we were going to Big Bend, but I am now glad we’ll have a breather for a bit. Or, easy for me to say: I don’t have to rebuild a hitch.