How ridiculous is it that calamity struck 8 hours before the end of the trip? More than 5,500 incident-free miles (except the mirror) and that’s when I had to damage the RV? Compared to any minute or mile from the last 5 weeks, I was of course in over-cautious mode all day. I had parked in the empty left field of a Walmart parking lot, literally less than 2 miles from the consignment lot. We had completed our packing and even dropped a couple of boxes of food and incidentals at a post office to be shipped home. All that was left of the trip: go another half mile and drop the family and luggage at a Mexican restaurant, then proceed the extra mile to the RV dealer and hand over the keys. I had it all timed out, too: show up with the RV after 5pm to get everything taken care of before closing time at 6pm; walk back to the restaurant; eat; meet the airport shuttle for our 8pm reservation; arrive at the airport in plenty of time for our 12:40am flight.
I had pulled into Walmart for 2 reasons: to go to the bathroom and to see if they had WiFi that we could all use while we waited for 5pm to arrive. Inside the Walmart, I got the distress call from the parking lot: “there is some sort of damage… we can’t close the hatch… we promise we didn’t do anything… it was like this when we got out… what?… how?…!” I took a deep breath. What could possibly have gone wrong? I couldn’t be more sure that I left miles between me and anything that could damage me all day long. I was determined not to panic. I found a candy for each of the boys for their plane ride and begrudgingly made my way out to the lot.
Mom was standing over the rear passenger section of the coach. I wasn’t sure if she was about to break into tears or not. One of the storage hatch doors was open – the one that hinges on the bottom. She showed me how she went to close it and the door appeared at least 2 inches taller than the door – because the middle of the bottom frame of the door itself was bent upward in the middle so that it looked like the roof of a house instead of being straight across and glued to the wall of the RV. What had possibly gotten under there and lifted and bent that frame? I pushed on it, and it didn’t budge. Whatever it was had to have considerable force behind it, which meant I had to have hit something. But there was not damage to the wall of the RV or any evidence of any sort of crash into any post, curb, vehicle or anything. Now I was furious. Mad at having gotten this far without anything serious… mad at having settled on a recovery price for the RV which now might not be valid anymore… mad that with all my caution, we suddenly had a problem… and livid that I couldn’t understand what had caused this damage. Obviously, this was something that had happened while we were moving, something I had done myself somehow, but what?
Sean could see that all I had to do was push on the frame to flatten it out again to give the door room to close. I pushed, and nothing. I pushed harder, but the metal lip only hurt my hand. I tried a different angle and made a little bit of a difference. I paused and looked everything over one more time, and then it struck me as to what happened. At the post office, I had carefully gone around the coach and opened every single hatch to make sure we weren’t leaving anything behind. The finicky latch mechanisms had either not closed properly or had vibrated loose. Since this door opened downward, once the latches were loose, it flopped open. Then, on some bump that caused the coach to rock a little, the 5 inches of clearance below the bottom of the open door and the road weren’t enough. As the coach rocked over and the bottom of the door hit the pavement, the pavement pushed back and started separating the door from it’s hinge, but the hinge was strong enough to pull the frame up and away from the coach, instead of giving way itself. Mystery solved, I was at least resolved that we’d get the door closed so I could finish the trip. I found a way to get one good push on it, and… whew… the door closed.
On to the RV place, and the sales associate looked at it and concluded that the sheet metal straightening really would be all that it would take to make everything right. There’d been no real damage to the value of the RV. He had budgeted for minor cleanup, anyway, and this still fell int hat category. I suspect he was still more worried about how to extract 10 States worth of insects from the grill, windshield and front of the cab-over with the logo on it. Whew.
Back at the Mexican restaurant, license plates in hand, I ordered a couple of shots of their best tequila. Cheers, everyone. We hope you enjoyed my version of the trip and all the pictures. You might now want to talk to Mom and the boys and see if they were on the same trip….
