Thursday March 28, 2013

When we got up this morning, Larry noticed one of back tires on the drivers side was almost flat. Great! Another issue which is just what we need!! We got showers, the motor home unhooked and arrived at Freightliner by 8:00am. We pulled in and removed the car and dolly and one of the technicians came out and found our problem is less than 5 minutes. A vacuum hose that inflates the air bags that the motor home rides on, had slipped off. He put it back on and the alarm quit sounding and everything seemed fine. Wow, that was a lucky break. We asked if they could check the tire and they told us to drive across the street to a tire center. We took the motor home over and they replaced all of the valve stems and aired all of the tires up to the proper pressure. They checked for a leak on the one that was low but said they were sure it was just leaking from the bad stem and after they replaced it, the tire no longer leaked. Guess we got another lucky break for the day. We hooked the car back on and drove over to Pilot Truck Stop to fuel up and have breakfast. I think we were on the road by 9:30, which was amazing considering our problems. We drove all day and stopped for fuel around 3:00 and picked up a subway sandwich for lunch. We drove through some pretty steep mountains and at one point I started getting shooting pains through my ear as though I was on a plane. The pain was pretty intense and didn't quit even when we started down out of the mountains. This is the ear that has the perforated ear drum and the one I always have problems with. I took some Ibuprofen to try to ease the pain and it helped but did not stop the pain totally. I got an email from Jan and she shared their big issue that happened to them last night. She said that she and Judy were cooking dinner and heard a weird sound in the bathroom. When they opened the bathroom, water was flowing out of the stool. She told Judy to flush it and when she did, the water shot out of the stool all over the motor home and soaked Judy. Jan told her to flush it again to see if it would stop and again, Judy got soaked from the water shooting into the air. Ken came in and he tried flushing the stool two more times and he got soaked as well because the water shot out. He ran out and shut the water off and the girls used everything available to mop up the water. It ended up that he did not put the water pressure valve on the water line and the pressure was too much for the lines. Jan said they changed out of the wet cloths, sat down and ate their dinner and spent two hours doing laundry and taking showers. I laughed like crazy reading Jan's email as she is so witty, however, I felt sorry they had gone through such a nasty experience! We continued driving and I started looking for an RV Park for the night. It's pretty amazing that there are so few in an area that must be heavily traveled. We called 2 or 3 but they were so expensive we decided to continue driving. We found a KOA listed near Lodi so we called to check on availability. The camp office was closed so we talked to an 800 number who verified they had some open spots. We drove out of Lodi on a blacktop and when we found the campground it was also a boat harbor. We looked at the camp sites and decided to drive on as it was pretty sub-par for a KOA. We thought since it was so late, we would just stop for the night in the Walmart in Fairfield, which was about 20 miles from the KOA. I put the address in the Navigator and it took us out into a residential area with no Walmart in site. We pulled over and started looking for another campground and decided to drive onto Vallejo, another 20 miles. By the time we found the campground it was after 8:00. We pulled in and ended up going too far into the back area of the park and the streets were very narrow with cars setting along both sides of the street. We made a turn around a curve and found we did not have room to pull through without taking the car and dolly off the motor home. I told Larry to go up to the door of one of the RV's as ask the guy if he could move his car so we could make the turn without hitting it. The guy was very nice and came out and moved the car and we barely were able to make it through. It was so pitch dark back there, we had a hard time navigating through until we got back to the main road. The office was closed but we saw they had several open campsites. We picked one and it was so narrow, we barely had room to pull in and ended up having probably only 2 foot on either side of the motor home after we parked. What a very long day of traveling. It was after 9:00 by the time we got parked and the water and power connected. When I moved the slides out, the cat food had spilled and was strewn all over the floor and the cloths in the closet had all fallen off the bar. I worked another 30 minutes to get everything cleaned up and put back in order. We must have done more wild driving than I remembered today for things to be in such a mess. Hopefully they do not throw us out tomorrow because the few open sites are reserved. If so, I have no idea where we are going to move to as we still have not found many campgrounds around here.