Our RV Adventures

We hope. We haven’t actually left yet, so there’s always a chance something else will go terribly wrong.

I was up at 9:30 expecting the tire guy at 10am. Of course he didn’t show up until about 11:30. I could have slept a while longer.

He was trying to figure where to put his jack to lift the front of the rig, but I told him I could lift it with the levelers with no problem. Strangely he’d never seen that done, even though he’d apparently worked on RV’s before. I’ve heard some people say you’re not supposed to do this, but Spartan, our coach’s chassis manufacturer, says no problem, and they do it all the time.

And then it took him almost two hours to change the tire, because he couldn’t the lug nuts off. They hadn’t been off since the tires were first mounted on the rig in January 2008. His 500 foot-pound impact wrench wouldn’t budge them, even after spraying them with penetrating oil. He also tried tapping them with a hammer, again with no luck.

I suggested that he try a breaker bar with a galvanized pipe extension, and was surprised he’d never heard of doing it that way, and didn’t have one on his truck

But when I went out a little later, I saw a big breaker bar and extension pipe on the ground, and all the lug nuts were off. Apparently he borrowed them from the shop here.

When you have a eight foot bar and put 200 pounds on the end, that’s 1600 foot-pounds, and that’s going to either break the nuts loose, or twist off the lug bolts. Hopefully, it’s the former, and not the latter.

Later I took a look at my patio light problem. Regular blog readers will remember that a while back I converted my patio lights to remote control using modules like these.

12V Remote Control Module

So the next thing I did was to get the ladder from the truck and disassemble the patio light. At first I was confused because I had 12 volts going to the light, but it didn’t work. Then I realized what the problem was.

The polarity of the 12 volts was wrong. Who ever had done the repair had swapped the positive and negative. But I really don’t blame them. As I discovered when I looked at the shredded wire harness after the blowout, the wires are not color-coded or marked. It’s a bundle of identical gray wires.

And if the patio light just used a regular light bulb it wouldn’t have made any difference. But my remote control module expects 12 volts on the positive line, and not on the negative line. So a quick flip of the wires fixed the problem.

Around 2pm I went around to the office to settle up on our $500 deductible, though actually I only had to fork over $109. This was because we had been credited with $391 for a new tire from the insurance company, but I have already paid the tire company for 6 new tires, so that just balanced out.

I also confirmed that I’m not allowed to drive the coach out from here. Instead one of their guys will drive it about 50 feet, and then I get to take over. Seeing as how there are no coaches between here and there, I’m not sure what the point is, except “It’s the way we’ve always done things.”

About 3:30 Jan and I headed for our last dinner here, and Jan chose Golden Corral. By getting there at 3:52, we got the Early Bird Meal at $7.59 including drink. Eight minutes later we would have paid $11.49 (senior discount)  plus a $2.19 drink, for a total of $13.68. So for eating dinner a few minutes earlier we saved a total of $12.19.

Nice!

And it’s not like they bring out the Filet Mignon and the Crab Legs at 4pm. As far as I can see, the only difference is the price.

When we ate here last week, I mentioned how they weren’t doing a very good job keeping the buffet stocked, with quite a few empty dishes. But this time someone was walking around directing which dishes needed refilling, and keeping on top of things. Much better than last time.

We plan on heading out about 9:30 tomorrow, with our first stop at the Sam’s Club on the way. Diesel there has dropped another 6 cents, and is now $2.37. Here’s hoping for another drop tomorrow.

Then it’s a couple of more miles down the road to Alvarez Tires to have them all balanced and replaced. That will take a couple of hours, so Jan and I plan on having lunch at Origin Bistro one last time.

Then it’s on to the Verde Valley Thousand Trails for a couple of weeks. After that, who knows?

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Thought for the Day:

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.” After all, if one can destroy words, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” – George Orwell, 1984

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We were up around 8:30 this morning so we could partake of the great breakfast here at the Quality Inn before we headed back to the rig.

About 10am the service manager called to see if we had the rig keys. I said “No, you still have the set we left with you when we drove back to Illinois last month. I do have a set that stays in my pocket, and Jan has a set that she keeps in her purse. But you have the set that stays in the ignition.”

I did find out that the reason they needed the keys is that the airbag had been installed and they wanted to crank up to test the system. He also said that pretty much everything had been finished up.

Well, maybe things are really looking up.

I told him we’d be down in a hour or so with my keys if he didn’t find the set he had. After getting the truck packed up, I went down to check out at the front desk. Turned out that for some reason the hotel had completely lost our stay. They had no record of us even being there. But finally after about 15 minutes he found our record on the corporate server, and got us checked out.

Getting back to the rig, I was happy to see it up on the airbags, so I guess that part was working. And after checking further, I found that the wheel well mud flap and trim strip had also been done.

But the grab bar light still didn’t work, although the switch panel had been re-installed in the enclosure. I put a new bulb in the socket that didn’t work, and then used my voltmeter to double-check, and still found no voltage.

Heading up to the office, I told them that the grab bar light still didn’t work, and was told that they had checked it and it did work.

Well, it didn’t work for me.

I also ask for both my sets of keys back, and once again it took them a while to find the ignition set. But the other set had the patio remote control that I needed to check out that repair. And getting back to the rig, I found that the patio lights didn’t work either.

It wasn’t like I didn’t kind of expect this. I said in the blog right after the blowout that I thought the shredded wiring harness would be a major problem to get repaired. And it looks like it was.

But after fooling around with the grab bar switch panel, I figured out why they had voltage and I didn’t. The connector on the new wiring on the switch panel was loose. and tightening it down fixed that problem.

So all I have left was the patio light, and I’ll look at that tomorrow, But either way, we’re still on schedule to leave here Friday morning.

Finally!

The tire guy will be tomorrow about 10am to change out the front tire, and then as I said yesterday, we’ll have the rest done at the tire shop Friday morning on our way to Cottonwood.

About 4pm we headed out for one last visit to Beijing Garden, and always before, we got the same thing – Spicy Orange Crispy Chicken. I know it sounds like we’re in a rut here, but you’re always afraid you’ll try another dish that you don’t like near as much, and then you’ve just wasted a visit.

So it looks like we’re almost there, and we’ll finally be on our way again on Friday.

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Thought for the Day:

Only a fool stumbles on things behind him.

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