Category Archives: equipment_issues

Rig is Home Again

We have a large aluminum lawn ornament in front of our house after I moved it yesterday from its storage place downtown.

Hey, you're blocking the view!

Hey, you’re blocking the view!

Many thanks for our friends Shawn and Helen for loaning us some flat space beside their big rig while we waited a couple of weeks for the snowbanks to melt and the driveway to firm up.

We must have made a half-dozen trips to pick up items we’d left back at the Airstream and needed.  The worst was Saturday when I was baking bread — well, I wasn’t really baking because I had the dough through the three rises, the oven up to temp, and realized that the bread tins were eight miles away in the rig.  (Good preflight, as I love to say to others!)

I have a long list of items to fix, including the replacement of the refrigerator.  I’m starting with a leaky shower hose and a leaky faucet unit in the kitchen sink.  I picked up the parts today and will tackle the work in the morning.  Much of this can wait but it will be nice to tweak things in case we want to do some early summer camping.

Airstream2W

We’ll move the unit down to the only flat space on our property once we get completely unloaded and some of the major work finished.  Nice to have it home safely.

Less Road Trip Drama, Please!

We were booked to stay four nights in Mississippi, to see our friends and to let things melt more at home. Well, that changed when we learned that Kevin would be away at work and I got looking at weather forecasts. We had paid through Sunday night but a system was due there Saturday night into Monday so we ate two days fees and just left before sunrise on Saturday morning. In hindsight, it was a good move because we avoided tough weather and got our "let’s get home" juices flowing. Here’s how the weather looked Sunday afternoon with heavy T-storms listed until mid-day Monday. We got out of Dodge at the right time.

Driving on an early spring Saturday morning in the south is enjoyable, in spite of the good ‘ol boys in beatup pickups going to town at their pace. Try to get around them hauling an Airstream.

We got past Tuscaloosa, Birmingham easily but had a rougher time as the traffic got the frenetic "got to get to the mall" pace to it. We were aiming at Harrison Bay State Park where we have stayed in the winter. (I had checked availability and it looked to have lots of slots – but, I had forgotten that it was for Monday, our original arrival date.). We showed up after a long drive about 2:00, having lost an hour entering EDT, to find it completely filled. We snaked through the windy roads looking for a vacancy but all we got was stares. Let me just say that the typical camper was a local yahoo who smoked, drank, probably was on meth, with a pickup full of relatives and firewood. It was out of a Grade B movie.

We got out of there, a bit shaken with no plans. I remembered a little church with a big parking lot so we headed there, caught our breaths, and pondered next moves. I have an iPad app called All-stays that shows a lot of campgrounds, fuel stops, rest areas, even Walmarts on a Google map. The only thing that I could see on our route was a KOA campground about 90 minutes away. I called them, found that they had room, so off we went to a good experience – our first stay at a KOA. What a save – we kept thinking, as quiet settled in, of the circus we had run away from.

So I did some checking and found another KOA in Virginia and booked Sunday night. Then I checked the distance and realized that it would be another eight hour day on the road. So off we launched and enjoyed two or three hours of easy travel, before the truck traffic hit. It was easy getting through Knoxville for a change and I-81 was busy but moving ok. We stopped for some lunch at a Subway franchise and leaving the store, I encountered some serious potholes in the access road.

Just a few minutes later, I got back into the moving stream of trucks and was just up to speed when I noticed blue smoke in my left mirror. At first, I thought it was the engine but as I pulled over to the shoulder and shut down, I found one of the trailer tires had blown. (There are two on each side.)

It was scary working right beside the road with 18-wheelers flying by, shaking the trailer. I got the lugs loosened, the trailer elevated, and the still-smoking tire removed. I rammed it in the truck and checked my iPad to see if there was an off-ramp up ahead because I knew that I’d have to unpack the truck to get to the spare. There was a road about a mile ahead so after waiting for hundreds of trucks to pass, I found an opening, drove gingerly on the one wheel, and found a quieter spot to extricate and mount the tire.

The last two hours were just grinding it out but we got into another rural campground where we are going to take a day off and just get rested and caught up. Then, a rather easy day into Pennsylvania where we will winterize the rig against late freezes and then pperhaps we’ll make another long haul to Vermont.

In the military, we used to describe flying as hours of boredom punctuated by moments of stark raving, terror (or something like that.) This long-distance travel seems sometimes to be like that. We’d like a little less drama – give me some boring driving for the rest of the way.

Trying To Chill Out

Back at Balmoreah State Park, I wrote about our string of calamities and promised to provide an update on our malfunctioning refrigerator. Here’s the update: it’s dead and probably needs a complete replacement. Got ice?

It began about the day, weeks back, when Mary bought a lovely group of yellow tulips for the Airstream. Even in their coffee mug holder, they were lovely until they began to emit a strong odor. We put up with it for a couple of days but then ditched them – but even wrapped in plastic, they smelled.

It wasn’t until later, in Lost Maples SNA, when I had a fellow camper, who has done a lot of rv fixing, take a look at the refrigerator unit. Since I had no power to the unit, he was going to check electrical circuits. He took one look at the scene shown below, noticing the yellow stain and the still-lingering smell of "tulips," when he said, "Your unit has corroded and all the ammonia is gone. It’s dead."

We discussed options which included:

*replace coolimg system with an Amish-overhauled unit. (He had done this with his and felt it was still penny-wise etc since you still had 15 year-old circuit boards.

*find a big RV outfit in San Antonio or Houston and see if they could install a new one.

*limp home and get a local rv outfit to do the work

*limp home and replace it yourself

I had an email exchange with my brother who has a lot of Airstream experience ans am leaning toward enlisting his brains and brawn and do it in Vermont. In the meantime we have a plan which is working.

We had no cooler with us so I bought one in the first Walmart we came to after Lost Maples – about 60 miles away. We used that, and the refrigerator, with ice.

Then, once at Goose Island, I found a cooler that runs on 12 volt power and so far, is doing well. (Friends have said that they burn out, don’t work well, but all it has to do is last three weeks more.)

We are at a place with $.99 ice so it’s only costing a buck every two days. We have quickly learned to buy less perishables, and shop more frequently. We miss the ice cream and have fond memories of the nearly-thawed pints of Ben & Jerry’s we had to trash, after stuffing ourselves, when the unit died.

I’m tempted, in the Vermonter way, to loosen the damn thing up and kick it out the Airstream door on a back southern road and keep driving. Thinking more rationally, I’ll end up hauling it a thousand more miles to East Montpelier, pay the disposal fee, and stay out of southern jails.

The Balmoreah Triangle

The wind advisory for southern New Mexico was not kidding: Saturday we endured one of the tougher nights we’ve had with winds gusting off the lake at 50 mph or more, and the Airstream shaking and making all sorts of groans and bumps. At one point, I went out with a light to see if my belly pan and back bumper repairs were holding – and they were. Our neighboors, a young family with three boys, lost their tent in the melee and had to crowd into the grandparents’ small RV next door. You could taste the dust in the air; Mary and I were glad to hitch up in the early morning darkness and be on the way to Texas.

Winds were high on Sunday but they were out of the north and directly behind us. The trip through boring oil fields was mercifully short and we arrived at Balmoreah State Park, a small CCC-built park featuring wonderful wonderful spring water in thee midst of a desert. This "oasis" turned out to be our Bermuda Triangle and we could not wait to get out of there.

The first issue, which by itself would have been a small annoyance, was the internet situation. Here we were, four miles from I-10, and the At&T signal was either weak or when available, some version that was unuseable for either email or web. And unlike our present site, you could not drive a few miles and find a signal. I needed to make reservations for later in the week but Nada.

Then, a real stress-inducing event hit. After we had just parked but not unhitched or set up, the truck alarm went off with Mary sitting in the truck with the door open. I got my keys, reached in to turn the ignition on to stop the noise, and then tossed my keys on the seat saying "In case it happens again." I then took Penny for a walk since she’d been cooped up for several hours.

I returned to find an ashen-faced wife saying, "We are in serious trouble – the truck is locked." I freaked out, trying to blame her (it was my fault), realizing that on a Sunday in a town with 649 people, help was miles, and perhaps days away. Her pocketbook, my glasses, and our phones and Ipads were securely locked away. And then I noticed that my window was down about a little less than an inch.

I took two wire coat hangars from the trailer, made a three foot- long snake with a hook on the end. Carefully, with a number of misses, I hooked the ring and slowly started dragging it toward me. My heart sank as the contraption slid off the neat nearly hitting the floor but soon the keys were nearly at the opening and I got hold of the ring. I don’t recall breathing but must have. I got the small accompanying key through the opening but the thick plastic end of the truck key jammed. Carefully, I worked it through, with literally no room to spare, and had the key, the door open, and a victory horn toot that drew Mary from the trailer with relief. If the window had been up another eighth of an inch, we would have been hosed.

The third event, about which I’ll write more later, happened just afterward. The refrigerator would not turn on and the stuff in the freezer – particularly ice cream, was thawing fast. I checked fuses, power supply – it was dead. I went in town to the only store – no RV repairs in area, nearest store for a cooler about 50 miles away, so I bought a bag of ice and returned.

We had planned two night so I had unhitched in preparation for some birding on Monday (I was looking for a Clark’s Grebe which are often seen at a nearby lake.) We decided to leave this cursed place so I did some quick birding in late afternoon – and got the grebe – and came back and hitched back up for a quick getaway in the morning.

So, we are in the cooler/ice mode but our spirits are good and we are exploring options. We are in a beautiful small park in the hill country (Lost Maples State Natural Area) and hope to see the Golden-cheeked Warbler here. We’ve tossed out the map and literature from Balmoreah – don’t think we’ll be visiting there again this trip, or this lifetime.