2014-09-11 Learning Experience

I'm OK with being a newbie RV Full-timer, but sometimes you'd just rather not "learn" some things "the hard way".

We woke up this morning and got ourselves ready to leave Lewis & Clark Caverns State Park like normal with showers, breakfast, and then hooking up the truck to the trailer.

I noticed that there was very little battery power as I lowered the trailer onto the 5th wheel hitch. When it came time to pull the slides in (all 3 of them), the bedroom slide moved about half way in and then the battery died. OK, no problem. I remember reading that there was a manual way to move the slides in.

I knew where the pump motor was, but the instructions I had remembered reading said that the end of the motor would have a slot in it. The motor end was up against a piece of wood trim. Sigh. I removed the wood trim and there was a sticker over the hole saying, "You have found the hidden hole with which to pull your slides in. You may proceed."

I grabbed my battery-powered drill, attached the correct bit to drive the motor and started the process of pulling the slides in manually. This worked great until the battery on my drill died! Sigh.

Unphased, I grabbed my ratchet handle and started turning the motor manually, round and round and round. About 30 minutes later we had the 2nd slide in. Obviously, this was tedious and a bit tiring on the muscles.

About this time Karen comes outside and says, "Why don't you go borrow a battery from someone?" Uh, I HAVE another battery. It's in the truck.

5 minutes later after swapping out the batteries we have the 3rd slide in. I decided to leave the 5th wheel battery in the truck in order to charge it for the entire day of driving.

There are a couple of "moral to the story" lessons here...

Explain how things operate to your wife when you have trouble because she will probably logically arrive at a better solution than what's in your feeble mind.

Don't let your battery in your 5th wheel die NO MATTER WHAT. If you aren't hooked up to electricity for a couple of nights you are bound to get in trouble when the temperature drops below 40 and your batter dies because of cold-age.