We had hoped we could say “we’re out of here” today as this would have been our first day of fulltiming. Instead, we are here at French Camp in the middle of a waiting game.

Here is what happened…

We moved out of our house on March 1 and parked at the Pleasanton RV park for nine days to unpack and organize what little possessions we could take/store in the motorhome.  We also spent this time bidding goodbyes to family and friends as we planned to begin our new RV life on April 1.  We were also preparing/packing for our 14-day Panama Canal cruise, leaving on the 10th.

So on March 10th we were ready to go, to store Betsy and catch our plane to LA – so we thought.  Steve started the engine so he could pull in the slides and bring the four jacks up.  The engine started fine, but the hydraulic system did not ….oh oh…the jacks were not coming up, it did not  move an inch… tried again .. still nothing.  Panic sets in.  We have a plane to catch and a cruise to go on and we are stuck.  We cannot be towed since the jacks are down and the slides are out.  What do we do?   And oh, it’s Saturday (of course), no repair shops are open!

This is our first major motorhome failure, the first hiccup in our adventure!  Since there are no open RV repair shops on weekends, Steve crammed into the manuals and flipped through the pages to see if there are any troubleshooting steps.  In the meantime I started reading our extended warranty guidelines to see what I can do to help.  The park office gave us two mechanics to call who might be able to guide us.  I called the dealer and the salesman connected us to their mechanic who was off that day (thanks, Larry!).  He confirmed what  Steve had learned from the manual regarding how to bring the jacks up.  As for the slides, Steve and I got a great upper body work out for three hours as we manually screwed the slides in – 300 turns on each ram!

Once we finished the manual labor, we started Betsy and headed out to storage where she will be for the next 20 days as we travel aboard Coral Princess. We missed the scheduled flight, but made luckily made it onto the last one of the day.  All is well after a hard day’s work.  We’ll deal with Betsy when we get back from our Panama Canal Cruise.

Manually screwing the driver slideout in.

Okey, next

Steves’ demonstrated how to work on the socket wrench.

The lovely assistant checked to see if the nuts have been screwed in.

Screwing the passenger side slide out in.

Steve releasing the solenoid, so the Jack could be raised up.