Chapter 1
All of our
life together my wife and I have moved from one adventure to another, but for
the last three or four years we have stagnated.
Don’t get me
wrong. Retirement is good. We have a nice post and beam cabin, very few
bills and we are able to keep the wolf away from our door.
But there was nothing on our horizon. So
last December we purchased (got a loan) a 1998 Four Winds Class C RV that is
thirty-one feet long. We have left it
sitting in our driveway waiting for spring to get it ready for the road.
It is at least six feet longer than I would like, but it was the right price, has new tires, rear brakes less than two years ago, new ball joints about three years ago
and a ten-cylinder Ford engine with sixty-eight thousand miles on it. It is nearly twenty years old so there is
some wear; but nothing we can’t patch and repair. It is actually in pretty good shape.
That brings
us to why I am sitting here exhausted, back and legs aching, just had a BC
powder and sucking down my first Bloody Mary.
The ladder
on the back of the unit was not secure and needs replacing. I ordered a generic replacement ladder from
Camping World and this morning about nine-o-clock I decided it was high time to
start repairs: beginning with replacing the ladder.
No sweat, I
told my wife, a couple of hours job.
Then I
began: thirty-two screws holding the ladder in place. Sixteen of them rusted and the heads
stripped – or I stripped them. After
getting tools, losing tools, hanging off my extension ladder, cursing,
sweating, cutting up the ladder with a hacksaw I finally removed the RV ladder and
all the screws about one-o-clock.
Wife called
me in for lunch. Back out after lunch
and assembling the generic ladder, but not all the bolt holes line up. The RV itself slopes just below the tail
lights so I will have to modify the ladder to mount it. The ladder mounts are different from the ones I had just taken down so I had to fill the holes with caulk and put flat head
screws in where the old screws were – must keep it water tight - and will have to reposition the new mounts.
I have never
used the special RV caulk before and that stuff is good: It glues my fingers
together and the screwdriver to my hand.
It is
five-o-clock and I am beat. Fuck
it. I’ll finish it tomorrow. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of
hours.
Must make a
second Bloody Mary.
the Ol’Buzzare
Yes using the special RV caulk from Dicor has proven it value to me many times over in my 46 years of RV maintenance.
ReplyDeletePardon me for laughing hysterically! Been there, done that! Welcome to the wild wonderful world of Rving. Do you have a tape deck or CD player in your rig. You got to get road music. On the road again or Steppenwolf! ha ha ha ha ha Glad you are getting out there. enjoy and be safe.
ReplyDeleteI know nothing about RVs, but I do know that anytime my husband says, "It will just take a couple of hours," it turns into a two day project. Day projects turn into a week, and a couple weeks get done within the year. No such thing as a small project. Where do you think you will go first with your RV? -Jenn
ReplyDeleteSounds like you're ready for that road trip...Give me a holler if you end up in the Blue Ridge!
ReplyDeleteIt's the kind of job that shouldn't be rushed. Looking forward to hearing more of your RV adventures!
ReplyDeleteOMG! You sound just like when my David has to attack a plumbing job in the bathroom. It would have been really funny if you had scratched your head and found you had caulked your hand with tools to your head. I would have laughed til I peed myself.
ReplyDeleteI feel your pain. Sort of. It's more like the S.O. feels your pain while I stand on the sidelines laughing a lot. Every time we come home from a road trip we've got a list of things we realize we need to repair or modify. I figure right about the time we get the last improvement made we'll discover we've become too old and feeble to go anywhere.
ReplyDeleteSaw a motorhome built on a Toyota chassis, that one must be a Tetra!! Yours would be more like a Bluegill, in order to be a whale it would have to be a huge class A.
ReplyDeleteOurs doesn't have a ladder on the back, I think the original owners had it removed because of water leaks. In the paperwork that we got there was a letter from the original owners to the RV dealer complaining about leaks in the back where the bed is. I think it said that if they wanted to be wet when camping they would have bought a fucking tent!!
Had thought about installing a ladder, but now maybe not!!
When I was a kid I always dreamed of driving an RV around the country when I retire. Never considered what I would do when things like the ladder break down though! You would think something as simple as that would be a pretty simple fix, but I guess not.
ReplyDelete