The Atlanta Saga – Part 3

April 8

From the hotel in Bentonville (on Walton Blvd, no less), it’s a short drive to today’s side trip. The hotel supposedly makes breakfast available for their guests. Keep in mind I’m being a bit frugal when it comes to places to spend the night. I want a clean room and a well-lighted parking lot. Free breakfast is nice, but not required. Today’s free breakfast lacked certain typical choices as fresh fruit and yogurt. If you were looking for Raisin Bran or Cheerios, you’re in luck. Let’s just say the free breakfast was worth what I paid for it.

Pea Ridge National Military Park

I got to the park at about 8. Google says it doesn’t open until 9. That’s the visitor center – you can drive the 7-mile one-way road and visit the ten pullouts any time you want. They had a brochure on display behind glass but I didn’t see any to take. So instead of taking the drive, I’d walk through the fields a bit and come back at 9. (When I got back I saw that there were indeed brochures available had I paid more attention. No matter, though.)

The visitor center has some very nice exhibits and the obligatory gift section. There’s a theater as well. Nothing was showing yet and I didn’t bother to find out what the show was and when. I just wanted to tour the park.

Almost nobody was there. There were a few runners and cyclists and a couple of walkers. I saw one other car the whole time I was on the loop, and that one only briefly.

The park is well maintained, and the paragraph or so in the guide that explains each location does a fairly decent job of telling what happened. It should be noted that the Park is only a fraction of the battlefield.

It was the largest Civil War battle west of the Mississippi River. The only other “battlefield” I’ve visited was Glorietta Pass in New Mexico. All that’s there is a roadside monument. It could probably be argued that the monument is too much. The battle was won when the Union soldiers ambushed the Confederate supply train, stealing some supplies, destroying the rest, and killing the horses and mules. The Texans had no choice but to return home.

Pea Ridge was much bigger, but not yet on the scale of the big eastern battles such as Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, or The Wilderness. Missouri was a border state and there were Missouri regiments fighting on both sides. The Confederates ultimately hoped to capture St. Louis and make Missouri a Confederate state.

At Pea Ridge, 16,500 Rebels attacked 10,500 Union soldiers. The Union general was expecting an attack from the south, so he arranged his front accordingly, with his field hospital, supplies, and so forth to the north. But the rebels made an audacious maneuver and attacked from the north. General Curtis had just enough time to completely rearrange his troops – no small task.

The rebels were able to attach from an unexpected direction due to a forced march of 42 miles in 16 hours. It was a daring maneuver but left the men well ahead of their supplies and quite fatigued. That’s not the best way to enter combat.

The battle raged for two days, with much close-in combat. Howitzers fired canister, case shot, and solid shot into formations of soldiers at close range; sometimes in the woods, sometimes in the open. Each canister shot throws out a spray of 27 iron balls each a bit bigger than a pinball. In extreme cases, the canister can be double-shotted (i.e. firing two canisters at once). Case shot projectiles have hollow centers packed with gunpowder and explode above the enemy, showering them with shrapnel. Solid shot (a solid 6- or 12-pound solid iron ball) is typically used at longer range to knock down walls or against enemy artillery.

The Park’s grounds cover most of the battlefield of the last day. The battle is sometimes also called the Battle of Elkhorn Tavern. The tavern was burned down by bushwhackers and the currently standing replica was built in 1865. The tavern sits on forested high ground while much of the combat occurred in the cleared fields to the south and west.

The Union won. Confederate casualties were about double that of the Union. Missouri was never again threatened.

A short time after Pea Ridge was Shiloh. We’ll get to that later.

The Drive

After leaving the Park, I enjoyed the scenery. The weather was fine, I drove many miles of worthy Lotus roads: twisting and turning, up and down, and left and right.

Not far from Pea Ridge, I came to a stop sign at a fairly busy intersection. I was third in line. The guy at the stop sign seemed to be waiting for an engraved invitation. Then I realized why. He wanted to wait for a big car club to pass by. They had a large number of cars. I didn’t think to count them. But we sat there for more than two minutes, so the line was at least two miles long. There were muscle cars, hot rods, and I don’t recall seeing anything imported.

Maybe twenty minutes later, I saw them again as oncoming traffic. They were making a loop and would return to the intersection where I first saw them. I must not have seen all of them the first time. It was a really long line of cars. There were a fair number of interlopers, to be sure, but it was a couple of minutes between seeing the first and the last of them. There had to have been sixty cars, at least.

So, the terrain was different than yesterday: twisty rolling roads and almost no straight-and-flat. And the forest changed throughout the day. Yesterday and this morning, almost all deciduous, and by late afternoon, sometimes evergreens were the majority.

And the vibe changed slightly. No billboards for Jesus, only a few about abortion. And perhaps I’m starting to tune them out but I don’t recall too many Trump flags. Today, it was guns. Lots and lots of gun shops. I’m guessing there is more hunting in Missouri than in Kansas, so that’s no doubt a factor. Guns and this, guns and that. I had a little mental list going but once I saw “Guns and Honey” the others just got forgotten.

Over the course of the day, the terrain changed from one with mile after mile of Lotus road to something more like what you’d find in Illinois: billiard table flat made up of cropland separated by narrow bands of trees.

By about 4 o’clock, I said to myself, “What a fine day! No new rock chips on the windshield and the phone is working fine. Nothing has gone wrong today!” Clearly, expressing this sentiment, even to myself, made the godz angry.

The Fuse

I stopped for gas in Dexter, MO. When I exited the station, the car ran very rough and I nearly stalled it in the intersection. I managed to get off the road and into an empty parking lot. The check engine light was on, along with most of the other bad lights. I could restart it, but it wouldn’t run. This is not good. Broken down a thousand miles from home, ignorant and incompetent when it comes to repairing cars, my anxiety went into overdrive. At least I wasn’t stuck on the side of the highway.

After three tries, I was able to use my phone app to read the engine’s fault codes. I got just about every code in the book: P0076, P0077, P0445, P0444, P0447, P0448, P2648, and P2649. I sent a screenshot to Michael just to share the misery.

It was just after 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon, on Easter weekend. I suppose it could have been worse: it could have been Easter Sunday. Thinking there wasn’t much Michael could do for me remotely, I searched the area for repair shops that were open. The first one I called, only half a mile distant, didn’t answer and his voicemail box was full. The second number answered. They were 16 miles away.

I explained what was going on, and read him the codes. I told him it was a Toyota engine. He was talking to somebody else in the background. Between the two of them, they figured out what they could bring to diagnose the problem. They suspected it might be a fuel pump. Even though I’m not a mechanic, I dismissed this solution. Worst case, they could tow me to their place and we’d go from there. They said it would take about 45 minutes for them to get to me.

In the meantime, Michael had texted me a suggestion. After a search of the web, he said that it could just be a fuse. So I took the cover off the fuse box on the front of the car and checked all of them. They all looked okay to me. I really hadn’t looked at this fuse box too closely up to now. I was pleased to see that it includes a spare fuse of each kind I might need.

I knew there were also fuses in the engine compartment, but I didn’t know where they were. Nothing looked like the fuse box in the front. I didn’t know whether Michael was at home or not. Luckily for me, he was. I had him go to the garage, find the Lotus manual, and take a picture of the page that shows where the engine fuses are. He also kindly told me which fuse it would be if this was the problem. I wasn’t exactly sure from his description, so it took me a couple of tries to find the right one. And, typically, even then it wasn’t easy. All the other fuses I checked were translucent and you could see whether it was bad or not. This one wasn’t translucent.

Just as I was inspecting this non-translucent fuse, my mechanics rolled up. One guy hooked up his computer to my OBD port while the other used a bright flashlight to inspect the suspicious fuse. He said it didn’t look good, so I grabbed the spare 7.5 amp fuse and installed it. The car fired up just fine. Woo hoo!

Even though they didn’t do anything to help me, I knew I’d have to pay them just for showing up. Silly me, I was expecting something like $40 or $50. The one in charge asked for $100. I told him I had $80 cash and no checkbook. He took the $80 and wrote me a receipt that showed a $100 charge and $80 payment.

That set me back a bit more than an hour. To add insult to injury, my phone gave me a different route than is in my itinerary. There are multiple road closures and this new route avoids them. It’s an hour longer. And with more traffic. Ending, ultimately, with me violating both Rule #1 and Rule #2 with the final half hour of the day’s drive on I-24 in the dark. So it goes.

I felt happy to dodge a bullet. Even if I didn’t know where the bullet was fired from, so to speak.