Man Plans....

One of my favorite aphorisms is, “Man plans, God laughs”, or in my UU church it might be more like “the great spirit of the Universe laughs”, but you get the idea.  This is never more true than when one is RVing.  Something about driving a house down the highway at 60 mph leads to unplanned adventures.

So to catch you up, last you knew we were outside Tulsa, OK, staying at a LaQuinta Inn planning our next few stops.  Today, Wednesday, December 09, finds us in a LaQuinta Inn in Dallas, Texas.  Progress of a sort.  The Navigator is currently in the air flying back to Chicago for a planned dental visit while I do laundry and nap with the cats.  In between the La Quintas the following has occurred: 

               

Smokie (the car) and Chuck outside the LaQuinta in Tulsa

We arrived in the rig at our planned 2 night stop at Twin Fountains RV Park in Oklahoma City.  It was a lovely, level, paved site and we started our usual set-up procedure by hitting the buttons to put the jacks down.  These 4 leveling legs, commonly called jacks, are in the four corners of the coach and electrically rise and fall at the push of button to support the coach and allow us to get the chassis level.  If we’re not level, we can’t put the 4 slides out and the slides are what turn the tunnel into wonderful, livable space.  You can probably guess where this is going.  The jacks refused to go down.  The cats were tired and irritable after the drive and the crew wasn’t much better.  Much cussing, button pushing and more cussing and still no jack action.  Deciding we were probably level enough to put the 3 slides out, we continued our set up.  Electric hooked up – check.  Water hooked up ready to de-winterize (flush all the anti-freeze out of the water lines).  Wait – the pressure regulator is reading zero, but water is flowing but it’s also leaking out all over the connections.  No regulator, too much pressure, and now the water heater drain valve is spinning instead of loosening or tightening, and do we have water in it or not and….

               

The events were piling up in an unpleasant way.  I’ll spare you all the gory details and say that eventually we got usable water in our tank and water in the water heater and, given that the propane alarm sounded once, we opted to not turn on our propane and the RV park had a lovely bathhouse with good showers and we managed to sleep in the slightly tunnel-like rig.  The next day (Friday) started a long round of phone calls between the Navigator and Atwood, the maker of the jacks, while I searched the internet RV forums for ideas to fix the jacks.  All the suggested reset procedures failed and as the day wore on we agreed to extend our OK City stay for a third night and eventually a fourth night.  The next day (Saturday) was a day with more failure and the verdict finally was that we needed to find a service person to take a look.  Endless phone calls later the answer was that they could maybe see us sometime after Christmas.  Not good.  We had to be in Dallas today (Wednesday) for the Navigator’s flight, so we started calling Dallas repair shops and got the same answers until finally, one shop in Denton, TX said they could take a look on Monday morning.  Now all we needed was a hotel in Denton where we could hang for 2 nights while the rig was being looked at.  The hotel had to accept pets and have room to park the rig Sunday night before we dropped it off Monday morning.  The Super8 in Denton said yes to both and only lied about one.  We managed to squeeze the rig in anyway reminding them that they said they could do it and if we ate up 12 parking spots it was their own fault.  But that was Sunday. 

Before that, on Friday, we visited the National Memorial to the Oklahoma City Bombing – a sobering experience that put our problems into perspective.  

Each chair has the name of a victim

Child victims are represented by smaller chairs

Then on Saturday we visited the Oklahoma City Zoo which was fun and good exercise.

 Sunday we moved to Denton and Monday found us dropping Chuck off with Danny’s RV in Denton where they promised to look at the jacks and the plumbing.  We headed off to McKinney, TX, about 40 miles away, to visit Caudalie Crest Winery http://www.goatsngrapes.com/  where the charming Sue and her presumably charming husband, who we didn’t meet, make wine, milk goats, have a motley crew of dogs and generally are living a good life.  They are UK natives, brought to Texas through corporate moves and are setting themselves up for a pleasant retirement.  We tasted, bought and petted and then got the call from Danny’s. 

Sue in the tasting room

The bad news…the jacks needed replacement.  Parts would take 5-6 weeks to come to Denton and repairs would be pricey.  Alternately, we could drive to the home of Chuck, Tiffin Motorhomes in Red Bay, Alabama for repairs.  Which way to go?  What about our plans for December and January meeting friends in various AZ and CA stops? We weren’t loving the Dallas area and the thought of hanging around here was very unappealing.  A call to Red Bay was not helpful, they could order the parts and maybe in 6-8 weeks get us repaired.  After sleeping on it at the very marginal Super8, we decided; we’d go on, just as soon as the Navigator flew home for dental work and returned.  Danny’s agreed to keep Chuck until Thursday and we yesterday we decamped Denton to the LaQuinta here near Dallas/Ft. Worth airport.  Early this morning I put the Navigator out at Terminal A and came back to do laundry and make phone calls to repair shops in CA.  Hopefully they can order the parts and we’ll get there about the same time the parts do.  In the meantime we’ll seek out RV parks with very level sites and hope we can put slides out to live comfortably.  And if not, we’ve got the LaQuinta hotel directory in our back pockets.  Tomorrow, on to Abilene, or at least that’s the plan.  Katie plans…the Universe….?