A Riverbank, a Squeak, and the BBQ Problem

The empty lot behind Coffee Cup in Brandon, South Dakota, turned out to be another excellent overnight choice. The main truck-stop lot had been full, but the separate space behind it was quiet. One truck came through for about an hour, and otherwise I had the place pretty much to myself. By eight in the morning, nobody had knocked on the door or suggested that I take my little motorhome somewhere else. I don’t have confirmation that overnight parking is officially allowed there, but the practical experiment went well.

I needed gas before heading much farther south. I still had four of the 25-cent-per-gallon discounts from Circle K, and I wasn’t going to make it to the cheaper fuel farther down the road, so I stopped at the Holiday/Circle K in Brandon. The discount stopped at 35 gallons, which meant the usual collection of receipts: 35.000 gallons at $3.849, then 9.991 gallons and a final 0.239 gallons at $4.099. Altogether, 45.230 gallons for $176.65, with $8.75 saved on the first 35. Trip A showed 372.6 miles, which works out to about 8.24 mpg. Not exactly economy-car territory, but I knew what I was buying when I bought a house that moves.

More surprising was that the first pump actually worked. No elaborate nozzle positioning, no repeated shutoffs, no standing there wondering which combination of angle and patience would persuade gasoline to enter the tank. I’d been having so much trouble with that lately that an ordinary fill-up felt like a technical breakthrough. I walked away from the second transaction for a bit, so I can’t give it the same glowing review.

The day’s work location was supposed to be somewhere near the river. Directions got me pointed the wrong way, and I had to correct course after actually looking at the map. The reward was a spot near Elk Point, at the Bolton River Access/Burbank Beach area. I’d been looking for places to work with a view rather than another parking lot, and this one made the whole exercise seem worthwhile. I told ChatGPT the spot was worth the entire trip, and I was only getting started.

There was water, open space, and a place to spend the workday without pretending the RV needed a conventional office. I also found some mint and considered a minor landscaping project for the smiling dashboard companion. The larger pink successor to the little blue dude from my last trip acquired a temporary leafy hairdo. My next question was whether I needed to hide him from the game warden. There are probably more conventional souvenirs of a river stop, but I don’t see why he should have to travel bald.

Unfortunately, the motorhome had developed its own opinion about the drive. There was a squeak around 2,100 rpm, and it was an odd one: the pitch didn’t change with engine speed, the air conditioning didn’t affect it, and it stopped immediately when I lifted off the accelerator. It sometimes seemed louder pulling uphill. That made it less convincing as a simple belt squeak and more concerning as something related to engine load.

When I got a chance to look underneath, I found an upper/inner exhaust-manifold stud or fastener had come away from the rearmost passenger-side cylinder area. The driver’s side manifold looked badly rusted too. That doesn’t conclusively identify the source of the sound, but it’s a much more useful lead than spraying something on a belt and hoping for the best. I was about 1,070 miles into the trip, and the squeak was the only new driving abnormality I’d identified. I also started thinking about what the RV dealer’s original inspection records might show and whether any repair would be covered. No diagnosis, estimate, or warranty decision yet.

Meanwhile, a different piece of infrastructure was misbehaving a few states away. The home network in Helena was still offline, which also left Copernicus, my home-hosted agent, disconnected. I was looking at the Nokia fiber equipment and the Deco router configuration from afar, but a cached WAN configuration doesn’t tell me what’s happening at the modem right now. That led to a parallel project: exploring a separate cloud-hosted agent that could keep working while the home connection was down, and figuring out how to feed it a 19 MB export of my Telegram conversations. Apparently the solution to having one inaccessible computer is to consider commissioning another computer somewhere else. I can hear the project expanding already.

By evening I was thinking about Kansas City and barbecue. I was still about 230 miles out, with a possible arrival around ten if I kept going. That’s not a particularly promising hour for the sort of barbecue I wanted, and waiting until lunchtime the next day would eat into the miles I hoped to cover. I investigated the late-night alternatives with some skepticism. There’s a point at which getting something technically described as Kansas City barbecue defeats the purpose of stopping in Kansas City for barbecue.

I hadn’t committed to making it all the way there, much less found a confirmed overnight spot. The Ozarks are getting closer, and I still want enough time at Buffalo National River to enjoy the place rather than just photograph the campground sign on my way through. For now, the day’s definite successes were a painless fill-up and a riverfront work spot worth remembering. The exhaust manifold and the barbecue can wait for their respective answers.