What a day!

I told you I'd give you the good, bad and the ugly so...

I wrote my last post the night before we left Franconia Notch, NH. Well...we ended up spending a little more time there than expected. We were probably 10 minutes away from hitting the road when things changed. One of the last things we do before leaving is to put the slides in on Betty. However, our large slide decided not to cooperate. Would not move! Obviously, we couldn't drive with the slide out.

After some self diagnosis, I decided to call a mobile RV mechanic. Actually, we called 9 (not a typo). All were friendly but none could come out for at least two days. Based on a recommendation, I called the slide manufacturer directly. After more diagnosis, we determined that the motor was toast. I was hoping there was a way to manually push the slide in, but found out that the only way to do that is to take the slide motor out and disengage the gears. It's not a big motor (cylinder about 2" by 9") but taking it out is normally done with the slide in. Ours was stuck out so getting to the motor was going to take a little more effort. Ok...let's go to work. With a little help from Jamie (a fellow RVer from CT), guidance from the manufacturer, and some sweat, I removed the motor.

We were than able to push the slide in. BUT, with no gears engaged on the slide, it could literally slide out of the RV while driving. That would NOT be funny but would be one hell of a story!! I jimmy-rigged a lock to hold it in place, put away all tools, finished cleaning up, and we finally hit the road at about 4:15pm. Easily the latest we had left on a travel day. We still had a 5-6 hour drive to Bar Harbor, ME so we were certainly going to break one of our own rules of checking in by 3:00pm. Oh well. Is what it is.

On our way, we started calling mobile RV mechanics in Bar Harbor to see about getting a new slide motor. We found RV Upkeep but they wanted almost $900 for the motor. That seemed really expensive to me so we said "thanks but no thanks". We checked other sources for the cost of the motor. Guess what? Yep! That's the price of the motor. Ouch! Welcome to RVing. We called RV Upkeep back and scheduled them to come install it in three days.

Turns out that the majority of the drive to Bar Harbor was on two-lane roads. No problem but definitely requires more concentration. Made a quick stop at Taco Bell for dinner to go. Thought about using the drive-thru (just kidding) but that would have been a funny story.

Sun went down so this was the first time we'd driven Betty (towing Lou) at night. Along the way we encountered night time road work and we'd never driven these roads. Yeehaa! Just to add a little more excitement to our day, we got about 30 minutes from Bar Harbor and the fog started rolling in. Are you kidding me? We'd been on the road for 6 hours so the windshield also had a day's worth of bugs on it. My lucky day! Shit, it was a travel day so why not just throw in the normal rain as well? 😂 Luckily, that didn't happen. Not fun for Melissa either but, together, we navigated through it all and got to our campground.

But we weren't done yet. Our campground was on the left side of the road. The entrance wasn't well lit, and it was dark and foggy, so I missed the entrance even though we were probably going less than 20 mph. No worries. Better than making matters worse by turning across on-coming vehicles only to realize we were turning into bushes or worse. We went up the road about 1/4 mile, pulled over, unhooked the car, and turned around. Got to our campsite about 11:00pm. Finally a chance to breath a little bit. I back into the site and get out to hook up. Huh? I'm confused. Where's the hook ups?

Turns out, this was our first pull in (not back in) site, and it didn't seem particularly level. I'm sure the folks around us were thrilled when I pulled the RV out, turned it around and pulled back in. Had to leave it running for 5 minutes while I worked to get it level. Then had to use my flashlight to get hooked up. Making friends at almost midnight. 😄

Exhausted but showered, I fell asleep smiling. Seriously. And woke up the next morning to a this view.

Yesterday, RV Upkeep came to our site and installed the new motor. They also re-calibrated the slide and it works perfect. Yes, I probably could have installed it myself but the labor cost was worth the piece of mind and not having to spend more time on it. Thanks guys!

We knew some unexpected things would happen on our journey so just part of the adventure. Right? Thanks for taking the ride with us!

Wait 'til you see the pictures in my next post. Bar Harbor is beautiful and there's been a few awesome happy hours sitting in our site.