Deja Vu

As we started traveling again, I thought I should write a post about our last few weeks in Zephyrhills, FL.  I was beginning to wonder if we would ever be able to leave Florida, first and foremost due to Coronavirus keeping us sheltered for the last few months. The second concern was RV repairs and waiting for parts to come in. Does that sound familiar?  

We had a delay starting this journey last fall for the same reason. This time we thought we started the process for repairs early enough. We initially contacted a mobile repair technician in early March after discovering our ladder was rusting through near the top. We had a list of about five things, mostly minor that we were waiting to have repaired, so we thought he could take care of all of it when he replaced the ladder. After a couple weeks, the ladder was in and he came to do the work, or so we thought. The company sent the wrong ladder so it didn’t fit and we had to wait again. 

Over the next month or so while waiting on the ladder, it seemed we had a black cloud over our head. Every week, something else broke. The big ticket items were the microwave and our main air conditioner. Luckily our extended warranty covered those two repairs and a few others.  We have definitely gotten our money’s worth from buying the warranty.  Even though he now had the ladder, we had to wait for the air conditioner to be ordered and delivered.

We had some work to do ourselves while waiting. We replaced a few of our lights that weren’t working well; I even did some of the wiring work. Also, Tim had started building a bike rack to travel with his recumbent bike back in March but he stopped the work to think about a different design. He wanted to get a ladder and make the rack so that he could haul both the ladder and bike. He spent time the past two weeks getting that rack finished. He used the metal tray we had as the base, added wood supports and aluminum tracks for the bike tires. Overall, I think it turned out great.

Tim building the bike rack. You can see that the RV ladder is missing.

The tall piece of wood is to mount the ladder Tim bought. The bike tires will go in the aluminum channel.

The finished product with the ladder and bike loaded and secured in place for travel.

Tim decided to have the mobile repair technician also replace our batteries. We have been having issues with our hydraulic jacks and Lippert support suggested checking the batteries as the culprit. They were at 70% which should still work but is a little low so we went ahead and replaced them. We also has a breaker trip every time we brought in the slides. The technician diagnosed it as needing a new switch. Those two things have caused us anxiety on travel days so it was good to get it repaired. 

It was down to the wire for the repair work to get done though. The air conditioner arrived last Friday and he was able to finish all of the work that day. We really enjoyed the AC on that hot day and started packing up to be ready to leave on Memorial Day.   On Monday, it was a perfect test for the batteries and the new switch. The automatic leveling system worked better and neither it or the slides coming in tripped the breaker. Whew!  Thank goodness it all worked well because we were doing it all in the rain and getting drenched. 

So happy to be traveling again!  More to come in the next post on our travels back to PA. 

We enjoyed this beautiful sunrise at Glen Haven the day before we left. We will miss that Florida sunshine.