Sawing Logs

By the time you read this, we will be sawing logs. For the last week, we’ve been getting up way too early and getting very little sleep. So we have a lot of ZZZZs to catch up on. Tom and Barbara Westerfield’s motorhome is parked in front of our Winnebago, and Greg and Jan White are right behind us. We have all agreed that until we see somebody else’s door open today, we won’t come knocking.

On the opening day of the rally, when we were introducing the vendors, I told the audience that I had a goal this year, of not having to ask my friend Phil Botnick, from Phil & Ann’s RV Service,  to fix anything for me. At past rallies, Phil has worked on the generator in our MCI bus conversion, worked on the Winnebago’s HWH leveling jacks and our water heater, and once he even rebuilt the carburetors on my motorcycle!

Well, I didn’t reach that goal. I had to call on Phil not once, but twice, during this rally. 🙁

On Thursday, the battery went dead in our Ford Explorer. But it was my fault – I opened the hood. For me, that’s all it takes. During our Kayaks and RVs seminar, I opened the hood to untie the ropes that hold the bows of our Wilderness kayaks down. All I have to do is get near a vehicle’s engine, and it breaks. Phil jumped the battery to get me started, and then on Friday morning, while I was helping Terry say goodbye to all of our rally attendees, Phil took the battery out and took it to WalMart, since it was under warranty. They charged it and put it under a load test, and said it was okay. So Phil re-installed it, and we’ll see what happens. The SUV had not been driven in several days, and Phil thought that maybe there was a phantom load, or a light on that we didn’t notice. If I don’t ever open the hood again, it may work fine for years.

Later on, I moved our motorhome to a staging area so it would be out of the way of other folks leaving the fairgrounds. Since it was a hot day, I tried to start our Onan generator to run the air conditioner, and the darned thing wouldn’t even turn over! Hey Phil, I need you again! Phil told me to start the RV’s engine and let it run for a while, to help charge up the house batteries. The genset still wouldn’t start! So Phil came over, hit the switch, and the thing started right up! Just like I can break something just by looking at it, Phil can fix it just by looking at it!

We had been plugged into power all week, but Phil thinks that the Interstate batteries that we had Camping World install one year ago are bad. That would not surprise me at all, since everything else they did during that service appointment was shoddy. It looks like this just wasn’t my week for batteries. Thanks for your help, Phil.

Once everybody had their morning coffee and donuts, and helped us stack all of the chairs and tables, they started pulling out, while we swept out the Vendor Building. Then we drove around the fairgrounds to make sure that everybody was gone, or were close to getting ready to leave by our noon deadline.

I stopped to help Orv and Nancy Hazelton hook up their new Honda to their motorhome, since this was their first time to tow it. Redlands Truck and RV Performance Center installed a Blue Ox base plate and an Air Force One auxiliary brake on the Honda at the rally. We also looked for a cat that went missing from somebody’s motorhome, with no success. When I came back by again, a little later on, the coach was gone, so I hope they found their pet.

Once everybody was gone, we settled our bill with the fairgrounds, then dumped our holding tanks. With that done, I parked by the same horse barns at the back of the fairgrounds where we were for the week before the rally started. We’ll be here a couple more days, while we get all of our rally supplies packed back into our storage bays, review the rally with our advance staff to see what worked and what we need to refine or improve for next year’s Arizona rally, March 5-9, right here in Yuma. We also plan to saw a lot of those logs, as we recharge our physical batteries from our long, busy week.

Thought For The Day – A coward is a hero with a wife, kids, and a mortgage.