RV' ing

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Old-timers with RV

I own a travel trailer. I have owned several over the years, beginning with a pull-behind I purchased when my children were young. After my retirement, I gravitated to a 5^th wheel version of an RV and continued camping. I have learned a lot about trailers over the years. The most important thing I have learned is that they eat money for both regular maintenance and unexpected repairs as they age.
 

The worst thing you can do if you own a trailer is to hook it to a vehicle and pull it on the road. Trailers don’t seem to like the bouncing, twisting and jarring ride that is inevitable on all the roads I travel. They rebel at this treatment, mostly by fracture of some esoteric part that causes the dealer to remark something like, “I’ve never seen one of these break before,” as he hands you the bill.
 

The second worst thing you can do to a trailer is to leave it outdoors. Trailers don’t want to be outdoors. Despite all the advertising that shows an RV parked on the shores of a secluded lake with a forest surrounding it and a mountain in the background, RV’s prefer being parked in a heated barn, with low ambient light surrounded by other RV’s, all of them near a camping dealership. The truth is that sunlight causes vinyl seals to crack and colors to fade, rain causes joints to leak, and cold, well, that’s another matter.
 

As I prepared to de-winterize my 5^th wheel this spring I decided to look inside before tackling the job. The door wouldn’t open. After giving a mighty push, I learned that the vinyl floor covering (aka as linoleum for you old-timers) in front of the door had cracked open in the shape of a long, thin volcano . As I stuck my head in further, I discovered that the volcano extended across the entire entryway, under the cupboard, out the other side and then approximately in the middle of the entire length of the vinyl flooring. A helluva crack, in the vernacular.
 

“This won’t do,” I said, just as the Missus came up behind me. “I’ll need to find my roll of duct tape.”
 

After a lengthy discussion, it became apparent that the duct tape-fix wasn’t suitable for my better half and that I had better get myself to the travel trailer place for repairs. Since I am on a first-name basis with the service shop at the trailer place, I called Mike and described my problem.
 

“Oh yes, we’re seeing a lot ot that. You are caller number six so far. It was too cold this winter, wasn’t it? ha, ha, ha.”
 

“So, Mike, old pal, how much are we talking about for repair?”
 

It turns out that old Mike wasn’t such a pal, after all. He said the repair would cost in the neighborhood of two or three thousand dollars depending upon whether I wanted to replace the bathroom vinyl that had been miraculously unaffected by the cracking agent. Another trailer repairman said he would ‘work it in’ over the next three weeks or so while he worked on (presumably) more important and more profitable jobs. ‘This won’t do,’ I said to myself as I began the process of looking for another old friend in the flooring business. After several phone calls, I learned that trailer repairmen have extraordinary chutzpah in demanding extraordinary bills for routine repair work. My trailer is now being repaired at a flooring store after a one day wait at a cost of less than $400.00.
 

I should point out In defense of the RV industry, that this type behavior is not unique to them and those in other recreation-based businesses have equal amounts of chutzpah. Did you know, for example, that the worst thing you can do to a boat is to put it in water? And don’t even talk about airplanes. Ha, ha, ha.