Herewith, the beginning of Tour de Rover 2009.
As with any complex undertaking, one expects that not everything will go perfectly. Amidst the joys, there will be a few cloudy days, here and there one will feel a bump in the road, occasionally the happy traveler experiences a hiccup or two along the way....
But before this sucker was two days old, it had developed into a full-fledged, all-out, spatter-on-the-walls, barf-session. (Spoiler alert at the end of this entry.)
We left for Amsterdam in the evening of April 6 on a half-empty aircraft with a screaming two-year-old (not ours, thank you very much). Our plane landed at 10:30 a.m., and because our three pieces of luggage were among the first six off the plane and because there was no line at customs (does nobody want to visit Amsterdam in the spring?), we were at the storage place and greeting Rover by noon. The few maintenance jobs had been completed, and Rover had even had a bath. Everything looked great--for the moment. And by 2 p.m. we were in the campground just south of the city with a few groceries and a full tank of water.
Our first job was to unpack and de-winterize. Both pieces of our new “laundry” (hand-crank washer and spin dryer) had arrived intact in spite of the Transportation and Safety Administration’s attempt to Save America by unpacking and repacking the spin dryer. First glitch: By night we noticed our water tank was almost empty and discovered that the drain valve had never been closed after we had drained it for winterizing. In the process of discovering this, Susan inadvertently shut off the entire water supply and we thought that the water pump had quit. It took us a day to figure all of this out, of course, but thanks to our two big water storage bags, we got along without the pump or refilling.
One of David’s first jobs was to recheck all the tires’ pressure. Soon after he had begun, the air compressor quit working (as in “burned out”). We spent the second day in the city center of Amsterdam, in the wind and rain (so that’s why nobody wants to visit Amsterdam in the spring!). Needless to say, air compressors are hard to find in the tourist section of Amsterdam. We actually found a couple on the way back to the campground, but David deemed them insufficient.
The following morning brought a bigger problem. We had no 12-volt service to the motorhome: no lights, no refrigerator, no water pump, no water heater. (All these things did work when the engine was running, with the engine battery providing the service--but not when it was off. As of course it usually is in a campground.)
All the simple things we have tried have failed, and we have even talked to the service people at Born Free in Iowa. Right now we are in line at a large camping repair store in Oostende, Belgium, hoping our problem can be solved in hours rather than days. Our phrase from last year--“It’s all part of the adventure”--isn’t quite working for us right now. In fact, the next one one of us who uses it gets punched.
(SPOILER:
ings-thay o-day et-gay etter-bay.)
4/10/09