Our 8 worst moments on the road so far: severed cable, dead battery, lost skirting, backed-up sewer tank—“I didn’t sign up for this!”

During our stay near Red Lodge MT earlier this summer, we witnessed the misfortune of a motorhome driver who cut a corner too sharply and ended up with his powertrain wheels suspended over a ditch. It took several hours and an extra-large tow truck from Billings (not the one pictured) to free the beached whale later that afternoon.

As someone who’s been towing an RV around the country for the past six months, I could only think, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Many of you following our journey have remarked at what a wonderful trip Elizabeth and I are having, and it’s certainly been a great adventure so far, in many ways exceeding expectations. But we’ve also encountered our share of trying moments, self-inflicted setbacks, and close calls that could have turned out much worse.

Some of these situations I’ve shared, but most of them I haven’t—either out of pride or the idea that they weren’t that big a deal. But in the spirt of full disclosure, not only of the good, but the bad and the messy, here are what Elizabeth and I consider the worst moments of our time on the road (in chronological order):

Lost hitching tool

In mid-February, after we’d been on the road for about a week, we were hitching up the RV in Sneads Ferry NC for our next destination. I went looking for a specialized tool that came with the RV that we use to lift the stabilizer bars onto the trailer hitch, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Without the tool, I couldn’t hitch the bars or tow the RV. We were stuck. It soon occurred to me that I had probably left it on the bumper of the truck as were unhitching six days earlier, and that it had fallen off somewhere as we were driving the unhitched truck around town. After scanning the nearby roadside and asking around for advice, somebody suggested we go to the local hardware store and see if they had a usable substitute. We came back with a $13 standard-issue crowbar and, with a few modifications in our routine, we’ve been using it successfully ever since.

Damaged cable

Our most serious misstep occurred later that month when the signal cable connecting the truck to the RV was almost severed on our way from Memphis TN to Hot Springs AK. The cable controls the rear lights on the RV as well as its brakes. As we were hitching up to leave the RV park near Graceland, I loosened the signal cable to get it out of my way as I was attaching the chains. My mistake was to loosen it so much that once we hit the road, it was dragging on the pavement. As we approached Hot Springs a few hours later, in the rain and descending through the hills, warning lights began flashing on the dashboard that told me the trailer signals weren’t working. One even flashed, “Trailer Disconnected.” Since I could see the trailer fully attached in my rear-view mirror, I told myself the problem must be with the signal light. When we were unhitching at the RV park, Elizabeth noticed the cable covering had been worn away and three of the six wires inside it were severed.

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In a blog post at the time (“Hanging by a Wire,” March 2), I did recount much of this story and how a local RV repairman reconnected the wires and secured the cable for us. What I didn’t share then was how serious it could have been. One of the wires connects the truck brakes to the trailer brakes, so that when I step on the truck brakes, the RV brakes at the same time. This prevents the trailer from pushing up against the back of the truck and potentially even jack-knifing if you brake suddenly at high speeds or going down a steep incline. As I was admiring the repairman’s skill, I said to him that I was sure glad that the brake wire—which I assumed was the white one that was the thickest of the bunch—hadn’t been severed. The repairman pointed to a thin blue wire, which as you can see in the photo was completely severed, and said, “That’s your brake wire.”

A dead battery and beeping alarm at 1 a.m.

Our first campground in Big Bend National Park in Texas was inside the park at Rio Grande Village on its eastern end. The campground is well located near a scenic stretch of the Rio Grande River, but the downside is that our site had no hookups—no water, electricity, or sewer. We would be “boondocking,” or dry camping, for four nights. Elizabeth and I saw it as a new adventure and an acceptable tradeoff for a great location. Even without hookups, the RV can draw on a 30-gallon freshwater tank and its 12-volt battery can power the LED lights, water pump, and refrigerator. Clean public toilets were nearby. For reasons we still don’t fully understand, our battery soon began running out of power. It may have been the water pump working too hard. (I did blog about the first hint of trouble in “‘Boondocking’ in Big Bend,” March 23.)

Whatever the cause, by the middle of our second night, the battery had died. At 1 a.m., the small carbon monoxide and propane gas alarm began to beep to warn us that it was disconnected from the main power source and could no longer perform its vital duty. The alarm was loud enough and regular enough to make sleep impossible. I told Elizabeth I was getting out of bed to disconnect “it” from the wall. She thought I was talking about the refrigerator, which had also stopped working, and to save me the trouble of pulling it out from the wall and disconnecting it, she began reading through our owner’s manuals to find an alternative. In my grumpy, sleep-deprived state, it took me several minutes to figure out that we were not on the same page. Once I clarified that I was talking about the alarm, I went ahead and removed it from the wall and disconnected its internal battery to stop the infernal beeping. When morning arrived, we agreed that for the sake of the food in the fridge–and our collective sanity–we would depart that morning, two days ahead of schedule, for a private RV park we had booked just outside the west end of the park. We also expressed a mutual hope that this would prove to be the low point of our trip.

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Lost skirting board

On April 23, somewhere on the highway between Twentynine Palms and Simi Valley CA, a 12-foot-long piece of skirting fell off the lower left front of the RV. It was blustery that day across south central California, but nothing that caused us alarm. When we arrived at our campground in Simi Valley north of Los Angeles, Elizabeth was the first to notice the missing skirting board. It didn’t compromise the function of the RV, but it looks bad and exposes the press board and pipes behind it. That week I called an authorized Keystone dealer in Redding CA, where we planned to be in a couple of weeks, but the service guy there said replacing it would take 3-4 weeks and cost $7,000! That was a non-starter, so after a trip to Lowes, I covered the exposed area using a roll of aluminum flashing, tin snips, and a few wood screws–at a cost of $37. An authorized dealer in Colorado Springs was equally unenthusiastic about fixing our under-warranty RV, so we’re planning to get it fixed at the end of September when we visit the dealer in West Virginia that sold us the RV.

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Low-hanging hitch and stairs

Another problem we haven’t quite fixed yet are certain low-hanging parts that can scrape on the ground as we’re towing the RV. If we tow the trailer across uneven ground, the stabilizer bars on the hitch can brush the ground, resulting in mangled hitch pins and bent parts. The bedroom stairs hang low enough that at one campground, as we were pulling out, another driver shouted to me that they were still extended, even though they were fully retracted. At one point earlier in the trip, the steps had caught on a rise in the road, resulting in a slight backward bend to the stairs. We’ve managed the problem by acquiring an extra inventory of hitch pins (they cost about 50 cents at a hardware store) and driving extra carefully on uneven surfaces.

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Backed-up toilet

Competing with the beeping alarm in Big Bend for the low point is a backed-up toilet in Lemon Cove CA in early May. As background, in our Hideout the bathroom sink and shower drain into the “gray water” tank and the toilet and kitchen sink drain into the “black water” tank. Both tanks need to be emptied after about two days of normal use at a campground. With full hookups, we drain them into a sewer pipe at our campsite. But with partial hookups (i.e. no sewer)–as we had at Lemon Cove–we need to empty the tanks at a central “dump station.” We can empty them by either stopping by with the trailer as we leave the park or—if we stay longer than two days—by emptying the tanks into a plastic, 28-gallon “tote tank” we store in the truck bed and hauling it to the dump station. This allows us to empty the tanks without the disruption of hitching up and moving the RV itself.

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Things seemed to be going well at the Lemon Cove campground until 10 o’clock one night, when the toilet backed up, spilling several ounces of black water contents on the bathroom floor. The tank was full to overflowing, a day ahead of schedule! Along with the expected smells, an air of panic filled the RV. The regular dump station was locked, the campground office was closed, and the voice-mail message we left went unanswered. Faced with enduring a night with a backed-up sewer system, I heard myself exclaiming, “I didn’t sign up for this!” But as I calmed down, we hit on the idea of using the tote tank to empty the black and gray water into the drain of an empty, full-hookup campsite nearby. After a couple of trips lugging the tank over to the other site, our sewer system and RV were back in order. In the clear light and fresh air of the next morning, I concluded our tanks had filled up prematurely because our uneven campsite had caused the RV to tilt a bit away from the side where the tanks discharge, causing them to reach full capacity earlier than usual. It was another lesson that life can be messy.

Inches from a tree branch

In Northern California, a family we knew from their time out East graciously hosted us at their home in the countryside. We just needed to pull the RV through a driveway and around a tree in their front yard to a spot in their back yard with full hookups. As I was pulling the RV around the tree, I sense I may be getting a bit close. I got out and looked and saw that a sawed-off branch of the tree was about three inches from the aluminum siding of the RV. If they had made contact, I’m sure the three-inch-or-so diameter branch would have prevailed, perhaps even piercing the outer wall! I backed up the RV a few feet to allow a wider turn, and successfully delivered it to the back yard. The close encounter reminded me of a piece of advice from our friend Lyle Brunson—when in doubt, GOAL, as in “get out and look.” An older RVer next door to us in Coeur d’Alene ID, when he pointed out how close they had come to backing into a tree, noted cheerfully, “Missing by an inch is as good as missing by a mile!”

Me and my stuff all over Red Lodge

During our stay outside Yellowstone National Park, Michael and I jumped into the truck to go into Red Lodge for a few items at the store. I had been doing some chores around the RV that morning and didn’t realize that I’d left the truck-bed gate of the F-150 open as we left the campsite. When we arrived at the grocery store five miles down the road, I saw the open gate and noticed that three items were missing—the battery charger, the detachable bike basket, and the truck’s hitch ball receiver. Like the lost hitching tool at the beginning of our journey, this appeared to be another self-inflicted loss from inattention. I closed the gate and resigned myself to replacing the lost items, which I assumed were now scattered somewhere along our route. As we approached the turnoff for the campground on the way back, what should we see but all three items neatly gathered at the side of the road! Some kind and honest citizen had seen them scattered about and collected them for the rightful (if absent-minded) owner to reclaim later.