What a week it's been!
I'm afraid this is going to sound terribly whiney, but I'm not really whining. I like to think of it as an "adventure".
This has been a bumpy week. First of all, we worked our tails off at the house this week getting it market-ready. On Wednesday the realtor came to the house to take pictures, put the sign in the yard, and put the key box on the front door. All of a sudden, it seemed like this was becoming all too real.
By working our tails off getting ourselves out of the house, the camper has been neglected. We haven't really taken time yet to get our new lives organized. It seems like a tornado hit south Texas, localized entirely in the interior of my RV! Ugh!
The weather has not been cooperative, either. For the first five nights or so, we had severe thunderstorms every night. If you've never experienced a south Texas springtime thunderstorm, then you just ain't seen nothin' yet! On the first night of thunderstorms, we tried to bring in our slide-outs, only to have all three of them quit working. (I mentioned this in a previous post.) We manually cranked the closed one open again, but still can't figure out why they aren't working.
After the thunderstorms cleared out, we've had the pleasure of experiencing record breaking low temperatures. For the past two nights we've broken low temperature records, and the daytime highs weren't all that warm either! One night we were also under a wind advisory warning with gusts up to 60mph. I didn't get much sleep that night.
Yesterday I decided to try running my first load of laundry in the camper. After taking about ten minutes to figure out how to work this machine, I started the first load. About five minutes into it, Daniel started yelling about water on the floor in the back bathroom. (The boys have a "wet bath" half-bathroom with a drain in the floor.) Water was coming up out of the floor drain and was about two inches deep.
In a panic I called Steve on the cell phone to find out what to do. He coached me through the process of emptying all the tanks, which is a somewhat yucky job.
So what happened was this: I erroneously assumed that the washing machine drained into the front grey water tank since it is located toward the front of the RV. Makes sense, right? Well, apparently it drains into the back grey water tank, the one that the boys' bathroom also drains into. When I ran the washing machine, I overflowed the tank, causing the water to back up and come out the floor drain.
That was mess to clean up, lemme tall ya!
On top of all that, while emptying the tanks I learned that our sewer hose had a hole it in. I made a lovely little mess on the ground outside the camper. I tried to plug the hole with - what else? - duct tape, but that didn't hold for too long once the effluent started running through the hose. Sigh. So today necessitated a trip to the RV supply store for new sewer hoses.
Steve also spent time today trying to figure out why the slides - and now the awning too! - won't work. He checked all the circuit breakers and fuses, as well as the converter. All seem to be in working order. He needs to check the inverter, but we can't find it!
I forgot to mention that on that really windy day, one of the boys opened the back door and broke the hinge. He opened the door only about a couple inches, but the wind caught the door and ripped it from his hands. The door flew open beyond where it is supposed to, and the hinge broke off. Sigh. Just one more thing.
On the plus side, Joseph and Jonny have made some campgrounds friends with some boys in the next campsite. Turns out that this family is doing pretty much the same thing we are doing. They just retired from the USAF and are going to take a year to tour the US in their RV. The difference is that they have half the kids we have, and they are younger kids. But still, pretty neat that we aren't the only crazy ones out there! Ha!
