A few days later, on Good Friday, heading into the Easter holiday weekend (isn’t that always when you find issues?!?), we were at the RV and smelled gasoline. Uh oh. Within a few minutes, Mark had found the issue, and it is definitely one of those “can’t anyone do their job correctly” moments. Apparently, at the factory, someone took two ends of hose, one that connected to the gas tank, and the other that feeds into the generator, and connected them using a piece of duct tape. Now, I’m no expert, and I know duct tape is a miracle fix-it tool, but really? To connect hoses where gasoline transfers? On a brand new $100K+ Motorhome? WHHHAAATTT? And, of course, in the months since the RV was manufactured, the tape deteriorated and the gas started to leak. We are VERY grateful it started to leak while it was safely parked in Webster NY and not while we were on the highway or in a remote part of the country. Made some phone calls and finally got a mobile mechanic committed to come out on Monday (36 hours before our scheduled departure). Mark sent photos so the guy would know exactly what he’d be dealing with and could bring the necessary parts. And, by Monday at noon, after about a 20-minute repair job, it was done. What a relief! And it didn’t really delay us. Since we couldn’t safely drive it until it was fixed, I wasn’t able to take it out for some test driving around Webster until Monday afternoon, and we weren’t able to drive it to our townhouse to fill the water tank for the drive to Maryland. By 4pm Monday, those things were both done and we were feeling good (and relieved) that our trip was a go!
The week before our departure was spent loading up our ‘2nd home’. It truly feels that way, since we have dishes, pots/pans, utensils, linens, toiletries, cleaning supplies…everything we have at our main house – just less of it and in a more compressed space! It was a test of our organizing abilities for sure – keeping in mind, of course, that this house moves and, like on an airplane, items may shift during the trip. So everything has to be secured and nothing should be breakable if it happens to fall! We were definitely a bit surprised that everything fit okay – it seemed like we had so much stuff to go into a very small space (well, we did have a lot of stuff, and it is a very small space!), but miraculously, it all fit and we actually have some space leftover. And we figure, with each trip, we’ll learn more about what we absolutely need and don’t need, and we’ll be fine-tuning for a while. That’s one of our goals with this first trip, to learn what we don’t know and figure out how we’ll adjust going forward…hence a shorter trip and one that’s relatively close to home. We would have LOVED our first trip to be a couple hours away from home, but April in NY is NOT typically camping weather…so we figured we’d have to head south, or wait, and we didn’t really want to wait any longer!
