Our Winter 2021 Trip Begins!

Our original trip this year was to head to the Mid- and Northwest. We were going to go to national parks and spend 7 months seeing the sites in 26 states. That would have meant we had visited 47 of the contiguous United States. Unfortunately, covid-19 was running rampant in a lot of the states so we postponed leaving till today with a totally different itinerary (read: we don't really know where we will be going except in the beginning of the trip). We plan to stop in McKinney Texas, about 30 miles north of Dallas and have our windows shades replaced with automatic shades. After 13 years, and having fixed several of the old ones, we decided they needed to go. So today we began our trip.

I woke up the Mrs at 6:30 am this morning to put our final items away. Since the RV sat idle for 7 months, I wanted to get the tires inflated, as over the spring and summer they lost some pressure. We arranged to go to A. Foote Truck and Auto Service, the best in all of South Jersey, and be there at 8:00am. The best laid plans, right? Three of our levellers came up, the 4th wouldn't! So I had to crawl under the RV with a drill and socket to get it to raise. It takes 508 revolutions of the adjustment nut to raise the level one inch, and it had to be raised between 10-11 inches. Also, each time I would apply the brakes the leveller alarm would go off. I had to turn the control panel on and off at least 3 times, each time, to stop the alarm.

Another thing that delayed us: stink bugs. When we pulled in the slides we found layers of these smelly disgusting creatures burrowed under the rubber slide seals. Some were 6 layers deep! We scooped them up, as many as we could get, into a quart-sized baggie. We almost filled it up! As soon as we started scooping, they would drop to the floor and we'd have to rush to pick them up. We tossed that first bag in the trash dumpster before we left. But throughout the day we were catching more, even while driving. I estimate we bagged at least 150 of those little suckers before retiring for the night.

We arrived at 9:30am for the tire pressure adjustment and Brian spent more time raising the leveler. We finally got to leave Elmer at 10:25am. But the alarm continued with every brake application for the next 345 miles.

We arrived at our overnight location at 4:30pm, after stopping a 1/2 hour for our only meal of the day once we crossed into Virginia. We then worked until 6:10pm on the levellers, resetting the home position and auto level settings, finally getting them to work, at least for the night. We will see tomorrow morning if the fix worked.

Next stop: Sevierville,Tn, and relaxing for three days.