On Monday, we moved into the RV. We did the best we could with the apartment, but it wasn’t perfect.
We’ve been in the RV since then. Yesterday we got new tires, and they said they’d hold off on the oil change because we had been there for three hours. It took longer than expected, but it was worth it. The RV rides a little smoother now that it has tires on it that aren’t ten years old. We go back on Wednesday to get the oil change done and to get a engine condition check to see if there are any problems we don’t know about. Hopefully there is nothing wrong with it. We’ve driven it a few times and its been pretty good. It did backfire once after I shut it off, but the mechanic said that might be due to the exhaust leak we already knew about. It is hopefully an easy fix or else we will be in Wisconsin later than planned.
It took me until Wednesday to figure out how to connect the power. I had looked in every basement bay and couldn’t find a place to plug the extension cord in. I found a cord that was an adapter from 30 amp to 50 amp, so I assumed there was an outlet somewhere that allowed me to plug that cord into. Turns out I was wrong. What I thought was a hose of some sort was actually the electric plug. Its about an inch in diameter. Big black electric cord. So we got that working.
Next up was the AC. It turns on, runs for 30 seconds then shuts off. Then it repeats the cycle every three minutes or so. So apparently we have no AC. That’s not a good thing, but we have workarounds. I’ll get that looked at later when we head to Florida.
And then there is the water. I filled the water tank about halfway, opened the faucet, turned on the pump. No water. I searched everywhere, researched everything I could find, and it still doesn’t work. I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to prime the pump, which requires disconnecting the outlet from the pump and pouring some water in, then there will be water in the pump instead of air, so the motor should spin and push water through. The only problem is that the pump is not easy to get to. I wanted to get the water working tonight, but it looks like I’ll have to wait until tomorrow. I need to fill a jug of water to dump down the toilet, so I’ll get some extra and pour that into the outbound hose on the pump and hopefully that will work.
The final thing I need to do, and I’ve been trying to do this for awhile, is finish my cat barrier for the underside of the dash. We don’t want the cats sneaking in there. They can’t get anywhere, but Rain especially loves to chew electric wires, and the last thing I need is a dash with broken wires. I have to find my wire cutter to do that, so that’s the first thing I’m going to do in the morning when I get up. Then we can let the cats out and allow them to wander around and figure out what they’ve gotten themselves into. We have taken them out a couple of times a day to let them stretch their legs and use the litter box, but they still have been cooped up for longer than I’d like.
Hopefully that is all and we can get things going properly. Its not a big list, though we still have packing to do, but we do a couple of boxes a day and its getting smaller and smaller. We also have to downsize some more, we brought with us a lot of stuff we can probably do without, but we were rushed at the end and just throwing stuff in boxes to get it out of the apartment. I know we have more than we need.
One other thing, we need to clean out the basement compartments. The previous owners had filled them with various items, some useful, some not. Most of it is too old to be useful though. We will probably pull the RV up next to the dumpster and just trash most of it. There are chemicals and oil for the engine, but all of it is so old its probably no good. Once we clean that out, we can start putting our own stuff underneath. We don’t have a use for winter clothes at the moment, and tools and tool boxes can go down there, so that should open up more space in the RV for us to move around.
Thats about it for now.
