Are We Having Fun Yet?

5 March

Well, nothing is perfect…

In addition to the problems we had with the furnace not working (it’s cold at night in the desert) we found that the water pump for the onboard water wasn’t working.  Inconvenient but not critical when you are connected to the park's water. I will return to this topic later.

So we started out home on I-8.  Mike looked at the rear view mirror and saw white smoke coming from the driver’s side RPOD wheel.  Uh oh… And there are only a few exits on I-8 between Phoenix and Casa Grande.  Fortunately Mike was yards from one of them and got the rig off safely.  I was ahead; the walkie talkies weren’t working.  Mike used the phone, told me the RPOD was ON FIRE, turn around NOW.  I had to go 10 miles or more to exit and turn around, spent 30 minutes (mostly on hold with Good Sam’s to place the service call), and turned back west to join a very aggravated Mike.

Mercifully, not on the shoulder of I-8.

And there we sat for five hours, increasingly angry at the poor response time from the repair service in Phoenix.  Fortunately, I was sufficiently foresighted to have cold beer and lunch on ice.  So we waited…and waited…and waited.  The repair guy finally showed up and did a great job.  He told us he couldn’t do a permanent repair but only a temporary one to get us home (we were about 200 miles away). 

Help at long, long last.

We started up again at 5:45 pm.  Mike wanted a Walmart away from the Interstate and on the east side of Tucson .  (Had to cancel our reservation in Willcox because it was too far).  Found a Walmart online and plugged the address into the Garmin and off we went.  And it got very, very dark and I’m night blind.  We finally got to where Garmin told us to get off I-10, far beyond Tucson and in the middle of nowhere with no lights visible.  Garmin kept saying “X miles to destination, .X miles to destination, etc.”  And still no lights.  I figured we would come to the address and there would be a big sign “Coming in 2017, Walmart!” 

I may never be as glad again to see a lighted-up Walmart.  We were dead tired.  Of course, we had no on-board water which made it majorly inconvenient.  I made the mistake of putting down the electric jack and forgot about it.  When Mike started up the next morning, the jack bent and jammed.  (Were we having fun yet?)  So we limped back to Deming with the jack 1.5” above the pavement. 

Well, the RV life is not all beer and skittles, as they say.  We got home safely which is the important part.  Hauled the RPOD into Jimmy’s RV Repair in Deming and went through a laundry list of things needing fixing.  Jimmy has until June to get them all done as we aren’t going anywhere until then.

For the past two days, I have spent all my time cleaning, doing laundry, and re-organizing .  With better weather, cold beer, and gas in the Honda I will be able to return to what I like…desert riding.