"Up early and on the road... we grabbed a bagel and coffee at the motel, then headed for Chicago (100 miles away)...   Sunday morning and got there about 10:00, so not much traffic...  lots of roadwork as always, with lane changes, but not enough traffic to slow us down... finally we reached the Northwest toll road (I-90) on the west side and were home free....   but then it started raining and came down so hard cars were stopped...  we kept going and it finally let up some... Traffic out of the city was heavy and we were on a 4 lane road in the middle lanes...    then a Van pulled along the passenger side honking its horn and waving at Suzanne for us to pull over... a van full of men outside of Chicago on a rainy day wanting us to pull over??   I could not see anything wrong, and could see both sides of the trailers and the tires, so knew we did not have a flat...  top was down....  so I ignored them and continued.. they then went behind and came up on the drivers side, pointing at the back of the trailer....    so.. finally I pulled over into the right land and off the road... seeing us stopping, the van went on down the road with the traffic...   we pulled up behind another car that was stopped along the road, which quickly moved on down the highway....   traffic was too heavy for me to open my door so Suzanne got out and went to look....   she came back and said that the A'liner bumper and spare tire mounted on it was dragging  along behind us on the pavement...!!    Hard to believe, I finally got a break in the traffic and went to look.... for sure, the bumper had broken off the frame on the right side and was just hanging on by a small piece of metal on the left side while dragging the spare tire down the road... 

I gave the bumper a twist and the remaining piece broke off from the frame... then I got my tools, took the spare tire off of the bumper, opened the A'liner, and was able to stuff the spare tire and bumper inside of it....   300 miles to go....   we felt so pathetic, we couldn't help but laugh...  coming back from this great trip and having the A'liner fall apart on the way home....    very lucky that the bumper did not break off completely as it could have caused a bad accident with all the traffic behind us on the Interstate... "

Fellow A'vanners were able to follow Bob and Sues progress on the net - better than watching any "soap" and real life. Bob's site works in "frames" so we can't give you an exact address. Start at www.bhoffcomp.com/maritime/ then click on "Enter here", then on "Daily Journal". An easy way to look at this site is to click on each journal page then when you are off line go to HISTORY in Internet Explorer and you can read all the pages at your leisure. Caution - this site can give you a severe case of itchy feet! Bob takes digital pictures for a living so not surprisingly there are quite a lot of stunning photos. Probably the closest Australian equivalent to this trip would be catching the ferry to Kangaroo Island and touring by road.