The Road Home

As we said goodbye to our fellow Caravan Adventures travelers, we turned our sights to home, a trip that we thought would last about three weeks.

Baton Rouge, LA

Our first segment took us just an hour-and-a-half north to Baton Rouge, the Louisiana state capital. We took it easy on our arrival day, decompressing from the pace of the group activities.

Interesting side note: we bought the Ciaowagen from Miller's RV, a Baton Rouge dealer, in May 2018.

On Saturday, we participated in the local No Kings rally, an event that drew at least 700-800 people by our estimation.

In the afternoon, we hiked a loop trail at Louisiana State University's (LSU) Barton Arborteum to get some exercise.

We'd noticed that morning that the campground was sponsoring a BBQ cookoff. They sent a message out after the judging that leftovers were available for the taking. We obliged and had a delicious BBQ dinner for free.

Natchez Trace Parkway

We continued our drive north and returned to the town of Natchez, MS. We stayed overnight in the same Vidalia, LA campground we'd been in a week before during our Great River Road caravan. The next morning, we crossed the Mississippi River for the last time on this RV trip, heading to the southern terminus of the Natchez Trace Parkway.

"One Mississippi, Two Mississippi..."

The Natchez Trace Parkway, operated by the National Park Service, runs 444 miles from Natchez, MS to Nashville, TN. Two lanes, no traffic lights, no stop signs, no billboards, and practically no traffic. Just a beautiful ride through trees and fields.

We took three days to complete the parkway, driving 4-5 hours each day with a break for lunch. The parkway follows the route of the Natchez Trace, a historic trail negotiated in 1801 between the US Government and the Chickasaw Nation. Early travelers on the Mississippi River and its tributaries like the Tennessee and Ohio Rivers would take rafts of goods downstream. They would sell their goods and the logs of the rafts, and then ride or hike the Trace back to their starting point so they could take another load downstream. In return for the right of way, the Chickasaw were allowed to operate inns along the route.

We stopped a few times along the parkway for sightseeing. The first was at Emerald Mound, the second largest Native American mound in the country. As you can see in the graphic below, the local tribes reshaped an existing hill into an 8 acre plateau with smaller secondary mounds on top holding homes and temples.

Although some of the upper mounds are no longer there, the site is still very impressive today.

Farther up the road, we stopped at the Cypress Swamp. The Pearl River used to flow through this area, but then changed course. A small swamp remains, and cypress trees are able to thrive in the still water.

Eventually the water will dry up and other types of trees will dominate, although that process could take a couple of hundred years.

In the northern part of the parkway, we visited the gravesite of Merriweather Lewis (of the Lewis and Clark expedition). He died at age 35 of gunshot wounds at a nearby Trace inn (probably suicide, but could also have been murder by highwaymen).

He was buried in the Pioneer Cemetery in 1809. When they decided to build a monument at the site around 30 years later, they partially exhumed his body to ensure they had the right spot.

Nashville, TN

We were initially planning to stay in Nashville for two nights at a huge KOA campground. We'd been in Nashville once before, in 2019 at the very beginning of our RV travels. We used that first couple days of our 2025 time for shopping, laundry, and a bit of relaxation. On the second evening, we drove to the nearby Gaylord Opryland Resort to eat at one of their restaurants and tour their indoor gardens. The resort is huge!

After dinner, we drove over to the Grand Ole Opry House for an evening peformance. The Opry's 100th anniversary is November 28th of this year, and they've been celebrating the anniversary all year long.

It was Country Classics evening at the Opry, which means that all the songs sung had to be at least 25 years old. Over the 2+ hour show, seven different artists performed including the Gatlin Brothers, who were the headliners. We're not big country music fans, but the show was fun and the artists (even the ones in their 70s and 80s) were all energetic and great performers. Each Opry performance is radio-broadcast nationwide, so there were also a number of live commercials for sponsors and for country-western-adjacent stores like Boot Barn.

While in Nashville, we also paid a visit to the city's replica of the Parthenon. The building was originally built as part of the Tennessee Centennial Exhibition in 1897 and served as the Palace of Fine Arts. Initially built of temporary materials, the city worked to rebuild and make it permanent using concrete in the 1920s. It is a full-size replica of the Parthenon in Athens.

In the 1980s, the Nashville parks department commissioned a local sculptor, Alan LeQuire, to create a full-size (42-foot high) replica of the statue of Athena that stood in the original Parthenon. That commission took him eight years. We were fortunate to visit while there was an exhibition in the building's basement about Athena's creation - a truly monumental effort.

One other interesting thing we saw there were replicas of the Elgin marbles, pieces taken from the Parthenon and now housed in the British Museum in London. Placed in front of a replica of the entire frieze and color coded by location, you can see how they represent only a small portion of the original statues.

An Unexpected Problem

On the last day of our Natchez Trace Parkway drive, we heard the engine making a "ticking" noise on top of the regular engine noise, although no dashboard warning lights came on and the Ciaowagen seemed to be driving OK. Once we arrived in Nashville, we called Coach-Net, our roadside assistance company. We've used them since 2019, and like them because they're dogged about finding repair services when needed, and also have in-house technicians that can talk you through problems.

During our initial conversation about the ticking, the Coach-Net technician suggested this might be due to our relatively high mileage (105,000 miles) but not dangerous. However, when we were ready to leave the campground on Friday, October 24, we tried starting the engine and found that it was running very roughly and then shutting down, plus the "Check Engine" list was coming on. We called Coach-Net again and they arranged for a mobile engine mechanic to come out to our rig. After running some computer diagnostics, he said that some of the spark plugs were misfiring and recommended that we replace them (we believe most or all were the originals from when the rig was new). Although you can access some parts of the engine from the front, you need to access the rest from inside the rig by removing a cover that sits between the captains' chairs.

The mobile technician replaced all the spark plugs and associated coils. However, when he restarted the engine there was a loud knocking sound that indicated that one or more of the pistons might be hitting the spark plugs. He said that we would need to get the RV to an engine repair facility to fix that problem.

Unfortunately, it was Friday night by that point, and Coach-Net would not be able to arrange for towing and service till the following Monday morning. On the bright side, KOA let us extend our stay in our campground site. On Monday, Coach-Net was able to find an independent engine shop that could work on the Ciaowagen, and arranged to have a large tow truck come Wednesday morning.

Given all the uncertainly about how long repairs would take, we decided we would probably drive the Fittata straight back home after the RV had been taken, if the repairs looked like they would take a while. We spent the weekend sorting items into things that could be kept in the RV (e.g., our e-Bikes, summer clothes, supplies) and things that would come home with us in the Fit (e.g., food, medication, winter clothing).

Our campground site did not have a sewer connection, so we arranged for a local service to clear out our waste. They arrived on Tuesday. After that, we left the KOA and stayed overnight in a local hotel.

On Wednesday morning, the tow truck showed up around 9:30 and by 10:30 we were at West Power Services.

They predicted it might take them a day or two to look at the engine, so we started driving east. Later that afternoon, we talked with West Power by phone, and they had determined that there were significant problems with multiple cylinders (the RV has a V-10 engine) and that our only option would be to replace the entire engine. Ouch!

However, that is still much less expensive than buying a new RV, so we authorized them to go ahead. The new engine comes with a three-year warranty, so even though the Ciaowagen has almost 105,000 miles on it, the beating heart will be new.

We continued our drive toward home, arriving in Virginia about midnight. We'll return to Nashville in a few weeks after the engine replacement is completed, and bring the Ciaowagen back to our storage lot, about a half-hour south of our home, for the winter.

Deferred Visits

Our original plan had been to travel from Nashville to Cumberland Gap National Historical Park on the Tennessee-Kentucky border. This is the area where Daniel Boone blazed a 200-mile trail in 1775 over the Appalachians to the "west."

After that we'd planned to spend several days in Cherokee, NC visiting Great Smoky Mountains National Park, travel to Asheville, NC for a couple of days, and then complete our drive home on the Blue Ridge Parkway and Shenandoah National Park's Skyline Drive.

Since we headed straight home in the Fit via I-40, I-81, and I-66, we will defer those locations for a future trip. We're bummed, but thankful that the engine breakdown occurred when we were near a big city rather than out in the middle of nowhere.

************************

Thus, an untimely end to our 2025 "roads" trip, shortening it by about a week.

Don't despair, readers! We plan to get back on the road in February 2026 for a nine-month trip we're calling "Rockies Redux." These are mostly places we've been to before, but want to see again before we stop RVing. Our trip will start out with two months of "snowbirding" in Tucson, AZ, then travel up the west side of the Rocky Mountains all the way into Canada, come back down the east side of the Rockies, and end up in Albuquerque for the October 2026 Balloon Fiesta. It'll be our longest period out in the Ciaowagen since 2021 and the first year since then when we haven't also done some overseas travel.

Stayed tuned for an update early in the New Year!