The carpet is wet. We have a leak. But it’s not a leak in a place where we have ever had a leak before. Come to think of it, we haven’t had any rain either. The carpet is wet next to the refrigerator. We have an ice maker in the refrigerator. The plot thickens. I go outside and pull off the outside panel revealing a portion of the rear of the refrigerator. Lots of stuff. I find a tube and follow it, looking for a shut-off. I find a shut-off, but soon figure out that I just shut off the propane to the refrigerator. I find more tubes to follow that really are water tubes. No shut-off. I look at the water manifold in the utility cabinet. There are shut-offs for every single water outlet in the coach…..except the ice-maker. We got out the owner’s manual for the refrigerator. It says if there is a problem with the ice-maker, shut off the water source. Okay. A little light glimmers in my head. Not a flash of light, but a little tiny glow way deep; from five years ago (five light years?). When we took delivery of the coach, there was a walk-though. A trained technician gave us a tour of every feature of the coach. The morning was devoted to the outside. The afternoon covered the inside. I remember some of the morning session. By the afternoon session I was numb. There was something in the morning session about a secret compartment; a compartment with controls in it in a place where you wouldn’t think to look. Something between the exterior refrigerator panel and the utility cabinet. I took a look. There was a cover on one wall of the slide out drawer cabinet, behind the slide out drawer. I went around to the passenger side of the coach and pulled the storage drawer out that side. I went back to the driver’s side and pulled the now exposed panel cover off the wall. There. The water pump motor, a water filter for the ice maker (We didn’t even remember our ice maker had a water filter hidden away. Must be time to change it!), and a water line valve, clearly labeled “Ice Maker Shutoff”. Mission accomplished. In this climate, the carpet dried in a day. We didn’t actually fix anything, but we did manage to stop the bleeding until we can get to someone who does know how to fix the problem. We’ll just have to make-do with a limited ice supply until then.
Ridgway State Park
Wednesday.
We get the roar of the river for background sound day and night.
Perfect mountain weather. Warm days. Cool nights. The campsite is a tight squeeze for us, but what a spot!
Unexpected adventures
Tuesday. Gremlins! We got electrical gremlins! They’re everywhere in the coach. First they locked us out and wouldn’t let us back in the front door. The door just clicked and latched, while we were on the outside. Finally, they had had enough fun and let the door click to let us back in. We drove away.
The gremlins left us alone while we were driving. A late start to meet a work deadline before we left, then off east we went. We turned right at Grand Junction and headed south though Delta and Montrose. Well, we didn’t actually go through Montrose, we stopped there for lunch. There is a perfect parking lot for us in Montrose. It has plenty of room. It’s right on the main road; easy-in, easy-out, and it happens to be the parking lot for the Russell Stover Candy Factory.
We were almost at our stop for the night, but I needed one last (internet) exchange with the outside world before we headed off the map and out of touch to our destination. We ate lunch. I uploaded, downloaded, and communicated. Then the gremlins launched their attack. They were everywhere. First, they wouldn’t let the slide go in. We only had one slide out, routine for a lunch stop, but it would only go part way back in. Lights flashed off and on then suddenly went out altogether, only to reappear moments later. Alarms for the carbon monoxide and propane leak detectors went off, then stopped, then started again. The refrigerator flashed warning lights. I started the engine. It worked fine and so did everything else. I shut the engine off and everything else worked fine for a few minutes, then went haywire again. I started the generator. Some things worked. Not everything did. We could hear the gremlins giggling.
We tried this and that. We made phone calls. We debated changing our destination for the day. Hours went by. We talked about sleeping in the parking lot. We heard about Carl. Carl is the proprietor of Uncompagrahe RV and Farm Implement Repair. Four miles south. Against the protests of the gremlins, we got the passenger side slide pulled all the way in. We found Carl and Judy gave him the fifteen minute version of what happened. He thought about it. We were blocking his driveway. He walked out to have a look at the bank of batteries in the outside compartment. He didn’t say much. He decided we needed to pull the rig around, closer to his toolbox. I didn’t know if that was a good sign or not. It took a while to clear a path.
Slow conversation. Carl focused on the house batteries. Looking and prodding. Finding a few points with a meter to test voltage. We slide the battery drawer out for better access. He pulled off all the fill caps and spent some time with a hydrometer measuring the specific gravity in every cell. He went back to the voltage meter. He grumbled. He started disconnecting cables. It’s a complicated mess, the spray of cables that turn four 6 volt batteries into a 12 volt source for the coach. He wasn’t careful. He just pulled off connecting cables and threw them on the ground until the tops of the batteries were completely clear. I was worried. Carl was calm.
Carl and Paula. They’ve been there since 1989. Carl worked. Paula handed him tools, paper towels, spray cans of stuff, fine cleaning brushes, a power wire-brush tool. Everything he handed back, Paula wiped down and put away. It went slowly, but ultimately, the tops of all the batteries were perfectly clean and dry. Every post was spotless. Carl turned his attention to the pile of wires on the floor. He pulled off every connector cover. He cleaned, wiped, power brushed, and put new covers back on every terminal. He measured their resistance. He put every cable back in the correct place. He fastened everything down with new stainless steel nuts.
We fired up the coach. Everything was perfect. We turned off the engine and fired up the generator. Everything was perfect. We shut off the generator. Everything still worked. Apparently, when the gremlins weren’t running through the coach giggling, that’s where they were. They weren’t hiding in the house batteries, they were in all the corroded connectors linking the house batteries to all the electronics of the coach. He got every last one of them.
Carl knew exactly what he was doing. There are reasons why the terminals were so corroded. We live on the beach. Everything there corrodes at warp-speed. Also, we had just driven the coach all day on engine batteries that were fried. We put out an all-day fog of boiling sulphuric acid vapors. The house battery terminals all got terribly corroded that day. The guy that changed out the engine batteries for us power washed everything off, so it looked better, but that wasn’t enough. (It’s not like the engine battery guy was bad. We brought the engine battery problem to him and he took perfect care of it. We didn’t know about the “other” problem yet.) The corrosion went deep; right into the wires. Carl charged us for 2 hours labor and nothing else. He set us free. Thank you Carl.
We drove the final ten miles to the park. We had a momentary discomfort, and thought maybe the Campground Gremlins had struck when we finally pulled in to Ridgway State Park at 7pm and found our campsite already occupied, but it was just a nice couple from Olathe who had been extending their stay day-by-day until we finally arrived. (We have been delayed getting here and this is the third day of our reservation.) Our new-found friends were prepared to leave at a moment’s notice and they did. The park welcomed us with a nice sunset.
Simple.
yet dramatic.
Travel day!
Monday. We got to travel. We were at the repair shop by 8:30. They put in two new chassis batteries, they checked the charging system, they charged us for 1 hour of labor, and by 9:30 we were on the road. The best possible outcome.
We had talked about continuing north to meet up with Becky and family at Yellowstone, but decided to go ahead and turn right at Cove Fort like we had originally planned, and head to Colorado. We had plenty of fuel so we cruised right past Richfield and Salina for the 110 mile trek across the Utah badlands.
Past Green River and into Colorado. We’re at Colorado River State Park for the night.
With its teaser view of the Colorado National Monument.
Layover day
Sunday. Jeff and Carol went on their way this morning. We stayed here. http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=107013362562471418011.00047964b60d16d130156&z=5 Saturday morning when I started the coach, the engine batteries sounded weak. That night, when we stopped, I could smell the batteries out back. There are six batteries; four for the house and two for the engine. The house batteries have been changed. They’re only a couple years old. The batteries for the engine are original. I think they’re shot. The alternator charged them all day while we were driving and they were steaming when we stopped. We found a shop that will have a look at it on Monday. We’ll hope all we need is new batteries and nothing else got cooked in the process. We must have adjusted to the time difference. Now that we’re working our way back east, we didn’t wake up before the alarm. We got a dozen birds in the campground. Robins, blackbirds, orioles, swallows nighthawks, doves, finches, sparrows, phoebes, kingbirds, meadowlarks. The usual suspects. This afternoon, the sun came out.