Friday, June 06, 2014

If it Isn’t One Thing…

Anybody who’s been following our blog knows that RVing is 90% great, and 10% not so great. I left out the not-so stuff in what I posted yesterday, so now it’s time to catch up. Sorry if this seems long, but it definitely felt even longer when it happened.

We arrived in Massachusetts late in the afternoon, and Penny started to prepare dinner. I take a bunch of pills with dinner (I take another bunch with breakfast) so when I got ready to eat dinner I looked in the cabinet where I keep the pills. NO PILLS. Now, since we’re usually on the road three months at a time, before we depart I arrange to get a backup supply from our online pharmacy, and I did that. But not for all of the pills. So I was able to take the ones I had, but the others were still at home in the kitchen. Long story short, we called Diana, who is taking care of the house, and asked her to overnight the pills to us at the campground. They arrived early the next morning, at a shipping cost of merely $82. I won’t make that mistake again.

As mentioned previously, we had a lovely time with Al and Christie, and departed for our next destination on an island in Lake Ontario. The next day was spent at various RV shops and hardware stores looking for repairs and parts. The New York State DOT has been busy resurfacing some of the interstates, and on one stretch of I-91 they had only a single lane open, marked off with miles of traffic cones. The cones were positioned about 12 inches into the open lane. Not a problem with a car, but our trailer is a lot wider than a car. The shoulder was full of pot holes, so I tried to walk the line, or drive the line, between the cones and the holes. I thought I did pretty well.

We arrived at our island campground and set up. When I turned on the water hose, water started pouring out of the bottom of the trailer. This was the first indication that I had apparently hit one of those traffic cones, which apparently bounced up and broke off something called a low-point drain, which permits all the water in the trailers pipes to be drained for the winter. With the drain fitting missing, the system can’t hold water. So I tried to attach some (wrong) spare parts and wrap them with supposedly waterproof tape, but my amateur repair didn’t work. Fortunately, we stay at campgrounds that have bath houses.

The next morning we called a nearby RV shop, and the service manager agreed to help us out if we could bring the trailer to the shop. So we packed up and disconnected. Which is when I noticed a tail light lens was missing as was a lens on one of the side running lights. I also noticed that the handle that opens (and closes) one of the waste water outlet valves was broken off, and the cap for the sewer drain was missing. Hmm, that flying traffic cone must have been really busy bouncing around under the trailer.

We got to the RV shop and the service manager needed about 2 minutes (with the right part and some knowledge) to fix the low point drain. They didn’t have any of the other parts we needed, so we brought the trailer back to the campground, set up camp again, then drove the truck more than 50 miles to Syracuse to shop other RV centers and hardware stores for the stuff we needed. We actually found all of it, drove back to camp, and made the repairs.

All was well. Until the next day when we were preparing to leave. That’s when I noticed that the errant traffic cone also broke the PVC drain pipe from the shower stall. Why I didn’t notice the broken pipe earlier, I have no idea, but there it was, as big as life. Since we were heading in that direction anyway, we called one of the shops in Syracuse to see if they had a technician available to fix the broken pipe. They did, so we went there and had that fixed.

Now, we’re at another campground at another lake, and everything seems to be working and no more parts seem to be missing. Fingers crossed. And just think, this was all in the first week of this trip.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home