Henry saves the day

 

We’re rolling down the road on an RV drive-about.  Can’t let the motorhome sit all winter long and expect everything to just work the next time we need it.  We need a shakedown cruise before our trip north in April.

 

Rolling down the road, Henry and Barbara in the truck and fifth wheel behind us, the check engine light comes on.  That’s not too alarming; it’s happened before.  We pull off onto the shoulder, shut everything down to reboot and fire it back up.  Everything’s fine.  We drive on.  Until the check engine light comes on again.  Okay, this is going to be a bigger problem than a reboot.  The engine temperature is a little high; 230 degrees.  It usually runs about 190.  Pull over again and have a look out back.  Cooling fluid all over the front of the tow-car, dripping out underneath from somewhere up front of the engine, and there is no coolant left in the radiator overflow tank.

 

Decision time.  What do we do?  We’re only about 15 miles from Lake Corpus Christi State Park, the place we mean to spend the night anyway.  We’re carrying 100 gallons of fresh water in the motorhome.  We’ve got all we need to fill the big overflow reservoir back up and get to our destination for the night, so we do.  Two days reserved there.  Now we’ve got two days to figure out what to do next.  We consider our options:

 

1. We go on to Falcon State Park like we’ve planned, stay a couple days, then go back home to get the bus fixed.  A 230 mile total.  We can stop as many times as we need to refill the cooling water, unless the problem gets a lot worse on the way.
2. We can scratch the rest of the trip and go straight home from Lake Corpus Christi.  It’s only 130 miles, but we don’t really know what kind of leak we have, and how much worse it’s likely to get.  Having to get towed would be a much bigger problem than we’ve got already.  These motorhomes aren’t really made to be towed without damage.
3. We can scratch the rest of the trip, also scratch the drive home, and go straight to Corpus Christi, only about 40 miles away, and find a repair shop there to take care of us.  That would be the most conservative option, but if we do, we’re turning ourselves over to a repair shop we don’t know (and we don’t get the rest of our trip).

 

Then Henry changes everything.  He says “No problem.  I’ll have a look at it tomorrow.”  What?  Wait a minute.  Oh yeah.  Henry is a building engineer.  He is also an auto mechanic.  He is also a diesel mechanic.  Henry is a lot of things.  If you need anything mechanical or electrical, Henry is your guy.  And he is right here with us!

 

Well, sure enough, the next day we open up the engine access door on the floor of the bedroom inside the motorhome.  Henry dives in with a pocket knife in hand and pops back out ten minutes later with a short section of heater hose in his other hand.  The hose had rubbed against a bracket for ten years until it finally got a hole and sprung a leak.  We take the cut-out section to the nearest town, buy an insert and some hose clamps, go back to the motorhome, and within an hour the repair is done, the engine is running, and we’re performing our pressure check.

 

Henry saved the day.  He not only saved the day, he saved the entire trip.  We spent our two days at Lake Corpus Christi State Park, drove on to Falcon State Park, had a couple great days there, and drove home this afternoon.  The motorhome performed flawlessly.

 

Thank you Henry.