Tangipahoa, Alumni Trip 10.23.09

Here's a little story about a trip we took, and what the bus did.

No outing club trip is truly great without a minor disaster. Maybe we shouldn't have insisted on the bus picking us up in New Orleans, but we all like attention and trouble, and that bus attracts both. First sign was when we stopped to get gas and the bus wouldn't turn off. So, we put it in with the bus still on. Then we took an exit that brought us south into the middle of the marsh, rather than north towards the river. Which turned out to be fortuitous, considering that the bus stopped going any faster than 35 mph, and something started burning. We pulled over into a boat launch parking lot and checked it out. Something was smoking all right. We decided to keep going. But it kept smoking. We found a gas station and called James, who knows about bus mechanics.

Every gas station is different and they're always fun in these situations. This one had hot dogs that you had to pay for, but you could put as much chili and cheese as you wanted on it from the nacho machine. For free. But I digress.
To fix the bus, you find a hammer and use it to bang on the misbehaving part. It worked (to stop the engine from smoking, although we still couldn't turn the bus off), so we got back on the road and hit the river at sunset, rather than our midday estimate.

At the campsite, under the stars, we feasted on 200 raw oysters (which, by the way, explode when you leave then on the fire long enough).