by Phyllis McCrossin
As I’m writing this, it is a quiet Sunday afternoon. Well, it feels like an afternoon. It’s actually 11 a.m., but King is watching football, which back home doesn’t begin until afternoon. So my ingrained sense of time is a little confused.
We are camped high atop a hill overlooking the Bonita Golf Course. The campground is full, but the sites are separated by high hedges so social distancing is quite easy.
It’s been quite a week.
I believe a few weeks ago I wrote a column smugly saying that since I took over the routine maintenance of our vehicles things had been going rather smoothly.
I take it all back. Every. Last. Word.
On the way to Quartzsite, Ariz., we lost the trailer brakes. We took the trailer to a local repair shop in Quartzsite and after taking it back twice we got it repaired… sort of. That is by no means implying the shop didn’t do a good job. I am pretty sure they did. But they only reached the tip of the proverbial repair iceberg.
The shop charged $117 an hour for labor, so King basically stood over the mechanic with a stopwatch. In other words the mechanic did as much as he could while keeping a budget in mind. The repair held until just east of the California border. Then the annoying dinging of the warning light started and the “message center” on the truck said, once again, “trailer brake failure.” Yes. We still had a few mountains to cross. But we made it.
We’ve also discovered there is a short somewhere between the trailer battery and the trailer wiring. Meaning unless we are hooked up to electric, a generator or the truck while it’s running, we have no power to the trailer. It’s no big deal now because we are hooked up to electric at the campground.
But our next campground will have no electric. We found a repair shop in the area that can look at all of it… they are scheduling into December, provided the pandemic does not shut them down.
On Tuesday I woke up to about an inch of water on the trailer floor. The plumbing under the kitchen sink gave out. Pretty sure the water hookup at a campground along the route had too much pressure. After all of the warnings we had given our son about hooking up our old trailer to “city water” we did not heed our own advice. We purchased a pressure regulator (at $26 I have no idea why we didn’t do it before). It took several days but we got the plumbing repaired.
On Thursday we were traveling back from our daughter’s home (where we are helping out with pandemic daycare) and I said to King, “Given all that has gone wrong, I’m glad we sprung for new trailer tires.” About 20 miles down the road the ABS and “check 4-wheel drive” lights came on. We got home and I was going to make a pot of tea. No propane.
At this point, seriously, all one can do it laugh, shrug one’s shoulders and move on. It truly is not the end of the world, and we will survive this. We’ve had worse things happen.
But I’m through bragging about being the maintenance Goddess. Karma… she will bite you in the backside every chance she gets.
