Monday, December 9, 2013

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas!


We arrived at MacDill AFB in Tampa, Florida, on Friday, December 6th.  The night we arrived at the campground, they were having a Christmas light judging contest.  What a great way to get into the Christmas spirit!

We took out our little box of Christmas items that we brought with us on our trip.  We have four strands of multicolored lights strung inside the camper, along with four pretty red bows over the windows.  We didn’t forget our Christmas tree!  We brought a little 18” tall tree that Steve used on deployments.  We decorated our little tree, then turned out the lights and awed over the magic that enveloped our camper that night.


Later on we drove around the campground to see the contestants.  There’s no doubt who won the decorating contest!  One camper was completely decked out!


So even though we are surrounded by sea gulls, palm trees, and 80+ degree temperatures, we are getting into the spirit!

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Shortly after arriving in Tampa, Steve took off again for two weeks of working in San Antonio.  It didn’t take too long for me to realize that our camper was unusually hot inside – 80 degrees inside when it was only 83 degrees outside.  With the air conditioner on???  Something wasn’t right.
I called a mobile RV technician to come to the base.  There was something wrong with ALL THREE of my air conditioning units!
The one up front in our bedroom had a leak in the duct work causing it to re-cool the already-cooled air.  This was making it freeze up.  Then when you turned off the unit, the ice would melt and drip on our bed.  The technician closed up the leak in the duct work, and all was well again.  Easy fix.
The one in the back in the boys’ bedroom would start to pour water into the room after only a few minutes of use.  The technician climbed onto the roof to discover that the weep holes were plugged, too small, and compressed too tightly against the rooftop which was preventing the water to weep out onto the roof.  So he cleared out the gunk stopping up the holes, enlarged the holes, and lifted the unit off the roof a bit.  And now this unit is usable again.
The unit that cools the main cabin was, unfortunately, not such an easy fix.  When the technician climbed on the roof and tried to lift the cover off the unit, he discovered that one bolt wouldn’t let go.  He asked if we had maintenance on the unit before, but I told him that we had not. Well, apparently somewhere along the line, someone replaced the cover and bolted one bolt crookedly, and that bolt was driven into the coils!  So there was, obviously, a leak in the coils which was causing the unit to freeze up.  Unfortunately, this was NOT an easy fix.  The entire unit had to be completely replaced.  And THAT really hurt the pocketbook.
And NO WONDER we were so stinkin’ hot over the summer when we were still in San Antonio!
Even though this unexpected expense put a dent into our Christmas budget, we aren’t letting it steal our Christmas spirit.  Joy to the world, and all that stuff!