Jolts on the Journey

JOLTS ON THE JOURNEY

We’ve written so often about the joys of our journeys that we think it’s probably time to give a more balanced account:

*Faulty gauges: On a wall near the refrigerator hangs a marvelous device: a panel of gauges designed to indicate the status of our on-board fluid storage. Our "home on wheels" has the capacity to carry 73 gallons of fresh water, 70 gallons of "gray water" (wastewater from dishwashing and showers) and 70 gallons of "black water" (toilet waste). There is a gauge for each tank, ingeniously designed to indicate whether that tank is "Full," "3/4 full," "½ full," "1/4 full" or "empty." As you can imagine, it’s rather important to know when the fresh water tank is empty or the black water tank is full. But, despite being replaced and worked on, the gauges don’t always work! Sometimes they whine; sometimes they lie; sometimes they can’t make up their little mechanical minds! When we’ve just filled the fresh water tank, the gauge may say "empty." The guage for the black water tank is not always reliable. Trial and error have taught us, however, to depend on more reliable indications of our water status. If, when we turn the faucet on full, it sputters and spits, it means the fresh water tank is empty. In the shower, if the soapy water massages our feet instead of disappearing down the drain, that’s a sure indication that the gray water tank is full. (June 2005)

*Mishaps: We weren’t going far, but we were out of water! The only public source of drinking water was in the space between some neighboring campsites. Our minds were so preoccupied by the challenge of getting close enough to the hydrant to fill up our supply, we neglected the obvious. The TV aerial was up and the louvered windows were open, but we weren’t going far! The TV aerial had a brief but intimate affair with some low-hanging tree branches before we ever reached the hydrant! Worse yet, on the way back to our own campsite, we misjudged the width of a curve and left shards of our window glass deeply embedded in a large tree! The jalousie window was patched with plastic wrap and package tape which held up amazingly well until it could be replaced several weeks later! (June 2005)

*Small sites: The Provincial Park in Ontario was beautiful, and very large! It took us an hour to find the proper office to register for a campsite. Most of the campsites looked as if they had been designed for tents or small pop-up trailers. The registration clerk, however, assured us the site she assigned to us would accommodate our 32 foot rig and truck. From the time we found the site, it was clear that she had never tried to squeeze a rig as big as ours into that campsite! It was fair sized, but included a large tree, a picnic table, a fire ring and straddled a ditch! Bruce studied it carefully, then drove around the block to try a different angle. Still no luck! On his third trip around the block, the camper in the site next to it reported that ours was the third big rig that had tried unsuccessfully to get into that site! How we wished we had a shoe-horn big enough to slide us in! Finally, we hit on a solution: we pulled just off the road, perpendicular to the lay of the site, and there we made our home for two days! (Getting out was much easier than getting in!) (August 2005)

*Gas prices: "Diesel $2.67" the sign announced to the countryside, and to us. It wasn’t exactly a bargain but it might be wise to get filled up before Hurricane Katrina drove the price even higher! So, we whipped our big rig into the gas station and eased our way up to the pumps. As Bruce lifted the gas nozzle, he took the time to read the pump price: $2.88! Into the office he went to protest. "I can’t do anything about it," the clerk lamented. "The price has gone up since the manager posted it on the sign this morning, and I can’t change it!" Maybe not, we thought, but we don’t have to let ourselves get suckered! So, off we went down the highway searching for an honest dealer, if not a better price for fuel! (September, 2005)

*Electrical: It was time to pack up and go back on the road after a long holiday week-end. The slides were pulled in, the water hose disconnected, the truck hitched onto the rig. But the "shoreline" (the electrical cord connecting our rig to the campground outlet) would not unplug! Bruce pulled and tugged, twisted and turned, yanked and jerked, but it was stuck in the outlet and would not budge. Finally, in desperation, he loosened the screws attaching the outlet to the outside wall of our fifth wheel and the entire electrical box came out with the cord! Then we could see what the problem was: the electrical current had, for some reason, arced, firmly welding the wire to the outlet plug!

Now what? The 12-volt current from the batteries would provide us with some light and the radio. But the larger appliances, like the microwave and the TV, required the 30-amp current we no longer had! Worst of all, as the temperature hovered around 90 degrees, the air conditioning system was useless! We went searching for replacement parts.

The first RV dealer we visited didn’t have the part in stock, nor did he have the time of day to instruct us where we could get it. The second RV dealer we consulted didn’t have the part, either, but he was kind enough to show us in his parts catalog just what it was that we needed! The third RV dealer was kind enough to order the part for us and to loan us a temporary substitute when the part didn’t arrive as promised!

So, five days after our electrical malfunction, we have no idea how long we will be grounded! We continue to function with a borrowed and temporary connection. Will the needed part arrive before we have to take to the road again, heading west? (September 2005)

*Communication challenges: In this "Age of Instant Communication," we struggle not to become drop-outs! Forwarded mail reaches us on the requested schedule but sometimes contains invitations to events now past. Cell phones may make instant connections between tribespersons in interior Africa but have "No Service" for us if we are more than 5 miles off many U.S. interstates. The quality of TV reception is directly proportional to our distance from the transmitter or inversely related to the shade of the tree under which we are parked!

And finally, we’ve discovered that spotting our big rig into a campsite is a two-person job. One person must maneuver the rig and the other person must "spot" the site to insure that the rig is centered, level, safe and not entangled in trees overhead or alongside. Driver and spotter communication is a fine art. Some couples use walkie-talkies; some just yell back and forth. We try to use the hand signals our driving instructor taught us.

Getting into a level site without trees, located to the left of the rig is not too hard. But tree-shaded, hilly sites into which the rig must be backed toward the right are really a strain on a marriage! The driver has to depend upon the spotter to plot a safe course through the visibility blind spots created by the big RV. The spotter can either see the driver in a rear-view mirror or visualize the obstructions directly behind the rig, but not both. Hand signals are useless when the driver can’t see them and meaningless when the spotter can’t see the terrain! So far our marriage has survived, but we keep a constant look-out for level pull-thru sites! (June-Sept ‘05)

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