RSS Breaking camp and Bennett’s
Filed in MaintenanceWhen I got up this morning I finished the cleaning up and started fixing things up for breaking camp. This basically involves strapping everything down with bungees or whatever is available, or putting trays in the sink, and hoping for the best. It’s one of those things where you live and learn and, incidentally, the catches on RV drawers are designed to be extra-strong. In fact, I have some considerable trouble wrenching the things open.
We wanted to return to the Bay Area to run some errands, and it seemed like a good way to learn more about what the rig could and couldn’t do. It took a while to break camp, what with the flushing of sewers and the hooking down of hookups and the fact that neither of us, really, knew what we were doing. One of the sewer hoses has a leak and when we dumped the tanks it sprayed a fine line of pee into the air. I laughed.
Forty minutes after we were supposed to leave we were ready and got on our way. We’d taken so long that we pulled in at the Target parking lot and I made a sandwich, marveling at how fun it was to be able to hop off my bike and into my rig and open my fridge and make lunch. I watched the shoppers go by, completely unaware that just a few feet from their noses someone was sitting at home eating a sandwich and watching them.
Our hose isn’t the only thing that is leaking. Our black water tank leak is getting worse and the rig steadily piddled from the rear. I took care to ride far back. ;-)
It was a sewer kind of a day. Around Stockton, a sewer extension fell out of the sewer extension storage, a hollow bar that sits at the back of the rig. The delicate aroma of raw poo wafted by as I rode by: such are the joys of motorcycling. I would have stopped to retrieve it, but there was a huge truck directly behind me and I figured that there was next to no chance of it still being intact.
Then, around French Camp Don left the freeway and took me down a series of lovely country lanes which were very nice for a motorcyclist but ended up with at a dead end. Don therefore had to turn the rig around, at exactly the same time that the resident whose gateway we were appropriating for the turn showed up, not to mention the mailman and the woman checking her mail. Even her cat sat up and looked as though it might come and take a peek. For every act of newbie chaos, there is an equal and opposite act of audience.
It turned out he was looking for the dealership. We had an RV that had been sold “as is,” but we’d also been told that everything was working. In reality, the cab air conditioning wasn’t working and the house battery was bad, so he went in to try and resolve that. I picked up my novel and read several chapters until Don came out with a brand new battery which he installed there and then, and the details of an air conditioner repair shop somewhere in Stockton. Meanwhile, I had to run the generator a time or two to prevent the ear-splitting flat battery alarm from going off and annoying the cats still further.
By now it was past five and the sun was low in the sky. I also felt more like reading my novel than riding all the way to the Bay Area, especially since I’d be arriving now in the thick of the commute. So we drove in convoy to Lathrop where I asked around and found out that there was a Wal-Mart in Manteca, just a few miles away. And that is where we went.
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