Well, let me tell you that the last week has been quite an ordeal. We left work, at Amazon, last Saturday evening at 9:00 p.m. and hit the road with our rig. Drove a few hours...stopped and slept. The temps plummeted the minute we left Kansas. The "warmest" temp we had was -17 (with the wind chill). Just to get diesel in the truck, Linda and I had to take turns, so only one would be out in the wind and cold for a couple minutes. It was horrible ! At one point, we heard on the local radio station that it was -25 with the wind chill. Although, it is a giant no-no, we had the furnace running to keep things from freezing. I had put a little RV antifreeze in each of the sink drains and the shower drain and some down the toilet for the black tank.
Coming across Ohio we ran into a snow squall. I reminded Linda that when driving a rig, like ours, if you start to fish tale you need to gas it not hit the brake as would be most people's tendency. It wasn't 10 minutes later but we came upon an area of black ice and the rig started to fish tale. Gotta tell you I thought we were done for....my heart was pounding and I grabbed the seat and door jamb as Linda tried to bring it under control. The cruise had been on so she tapped it to get the cruise off and then stepped on the gas and surely pulled it out of its attempt to jackknife us. Another mile down the road, we had the same thing happen and we were just crawling at this point...Ok, time to get off the road for a while. Luckily there was a rest stop about 2 miles ahead and we pulled off. Many truckers had the same idea as the rest area was filling up with rigs. After a nap and a chance to regain our composure we started out again and made it to Williamsport, PA around 5:30 p.m. on Monday evening. Then the real fun began....
Since we had run the furnace so much, on the way out, our RV batteries had become very depleted and couldn't keep everything going. Christmas eve our lights are going dim and the frig is reading "low DC". We pull the batteries out and take to local battery shop. There is a bad cell in one and other is just severely depleted. We buy a new battery for the rig and leave other one behind so he can charge. We had also discovered that our truck battery was dead due to being drained by the RV batteries....Things were not going well for us. The kind man, from the battery shop, came and jumped the truck for us and got that going. Then came the nightly ritual of starting truck to re-charge battery, then plugging in rig and trying to get everything back up to snuff. We ended up going out day after Christmas and bought a Honda EU2000i generator so we could continue to boon-dock here for another week. I'm able to type this post on the blog due to the generator running outside, giving us power. Merry Christmas to us....
Christmas day arrives and we go to my mom's for the day. On the way back, I get sick with the stomach bug that everyone at Amazon seemed to pass around. Day after Christmas it was Linda's turn. We are still weak as kittens and trying to rebound.Ho Ho Ho....can't wait for the new year. It surely must be better than the last 10 days have been.
1 comment:
Just went back and read this post...don't know how I missed it as I read the previous one but anyway....what a ordeal you two encountered with the ice drive...and then getting sick...bad 10 days for sure. Bobbie C.
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