So our 1987 GMC Ice Cream Truck has broken down, once again, in Arkansas.
Story goes like this...
Friday 17th November - We are Driving from St.Louis, Missouri, (where we surfed down the staircase infront of 'The Arch') to Little Rock, Arkansas (home of some guy named Bill Clinton?). Late at night the truck starts to make weird sounds, we keep driving. Its getting bad, we stop and check it out. Water is OK and we put some more oil in. Keep driving, it gets louder and sounds as if something is going to fall off any minute now. We pull over, 70 miles out of Little Rock and call AAA to get towed. After our little engine blow up in canada we figure this is the smarter thing to do.
SATURDAY - Midnight strikes and we’re still waiting. AAA call back 30 minutes later and explain that we are not covered to get our ice cream truck towed, as it is not considered a regular family car. We need to get towed anyway so we agree to pay and we wait, wait, wait. About 1:20AM our man Kevin arrives, does his thing and we’re on our way... in the wrong direction. He’s based out of Forest City, which is heading East, and we want to go to Little Rock, which is West. He explains the extra cost involved to get dropped off closer to Little Rock, and we ask him how much we’re up for already. $215 US dollars, just to get our truck to a mechanic. There’s nothing we can do, so we just accept it and continue on our journey East.
Soon after 2AM we arrive at the place where a mechanic will be at 9AM, pay Kevin his cash, and get to bed in the back of our truck. I wake at 9AM to a deflated air mattress, walk over to the mechanic and ask him when he’s available to check it out. A mixture of my tiredness and the mechanic’s thick southern accent make it hard for me to understand him, but I figure he said “be witch you boys shortly” so i wander back to the van and sit down. 40 minutes later he rocks over, we jump-start the truck, and his immediate reaction of ‘thats nasty’ can not be good. He jambles off talking some southern jibberish, saying its the engine and that he can’t start till Monday at the earliest. We have a feeling that it is still under warranty with Canada Engines so we try calling them (10 times) but no answer. Anyway fact of the matter is we need to get it fixed, and although we didn’t thoroughly understand Mr.Mechanic, we were pretty positive he was saying a new engine or something serious like that.
So we call Laura, our friend in Little Rock to tell her whats going down. She offers to come pick us up, but wont be there for a while, so we amuse ourself. We play soccer with a footy (pretty dang hard) and play trick for trick on the skateboards. Around 4pm Laura arrives, we pack our stuff, farewell our truck and we drive to Little Rock.
Tuesday 21st November we end up surfing in a Rice Paddy and Minnow Pond, behind one of the farmers utes. It was out near Lonoke, Arkansas, and the locals out there were super friendly. We even convinced afew to give surfing a go. It was a great day, and all the fellas had fun. Still no news on the Ice Cream truck.
