The gremlins left us alone while we were driving. A late start to meet a work deadline before we left, then off east we went. We turned right at Grand Junction and headed south though Delta and Montrose. Well, we didn’t actually go through Montrose, we stopped there for lunch. There is a perfect parking lot for us in Montrose. It has plenty of room. It’s right on the main road; easy-in, easy-out, and it happens to be the parking lot for the Russell Stover Candy Factory.
We were almost at our stop for the night, but I needed one last (internet) exchange with the outside world before we headed off the map and out of touch to our destination. We ate lunch. I uploaded, downloaded, and communicated. Then the gremlins launched their attack. They were everywhere. First, they wouldn’t let the slide go in. We only had one slide out, routine for a lunch stop, but it would only go part way back in. Lights flashed off and on then suddenly went out altogether, only to reappear moments later. Alarms for the carbon monoxide and propane leak detectors went off, then stopped, then started again. The refrigerator flashed warning lights. I started the engine. It worked fine and so did everything else. I shut the engine off and everything else worked fine for a few minutes, then went haywire again. I started the generator. Some things worked. Not everything did. We could hear the gremlins giggling.
We tried this and that. We made phone calls. We debated changing our destination for the day. Hours went by. We talked about sleeping in the parking lot. We heard about Carl. Carl is the proprietor of Uncompagrahe RV and Farm Implement Repair. Four miles south. Against the protests of the gremlins, we got the passenger side slide pulled all the way in. We found Carl and Judy gave him the fifteen minute version of what happened. He thought about it. We were blocking his driveway. He walked out to have a look at the bank of batteries in the outside compartment. He didn’t say much. He decided we needed to pull the rig around, closer to his toolbox. I didn’t know if that was a good sign or not. It took a while to clear a path.
Slow conversation. Carl focused on the house batteries. Looking and prodding. Finding a few points with a meter to test voltage. We slide the battery drawer out for better access. He pulled off all the fill caps and spent some time with a hydrometer measuring the specific gravity in every cell. He went back to the voltage meter. He grumbled. He started disconnecting cables. It’s a complicated mess, the spray of cables that turn four 6 volt batteries into a 12 volt source for the coach. He wasn’t careful. He just pulled off connecting cables and threw them on the ground until the tops of the batteries were completely clear. I was worried. Carl was calm.
Carl and Paula. They’ve been there since 1989. Carl worked. Paula handed him tools, paper towels, spray cans of stuff, fine cleaning brushes, a power wire-brush tool. Everything he handed back, Paula wiped down and put away. It went slowly, but ultimately, the tops of all the batteries were perfectly clean and dry. Every post was spotless. Carl turned his attention to the pile of wires on the floor. He pulled off every connector cover. He cleaned, wiped, power brushed, and put new covers back on every terminal. He measured their resistance. He put every cable back in the correct place. He fastened everything down with new stainless steel nuts.
We fired up the coach. Everything was perfect. We turned off the engine and fired up the generator. Everything was perfect. We shut off the generator. Everything still worked. Apparently, when the gremlins weren’t running through the coach giggling, that’s where they were. They weren’t hiding in the house batteries, they were in all the corroded connectors linking the house batteries to all the electronics of the coach. He got every last one of them.
Carl knew exactly what he was doing. There are reasons why the terminals were so corroded. We live on the beach. Everything there corrodes at warp-speed. Also, we had just driven the coach all day on engine batteries that were fried. We put out an all-day fog of boiling sulphuric acid vapors. The house battery terminals all got terribly corroded that day. The guy that changed out the engine batteries for us power washed everything off, so it looked better, but that wasn’t enough. (It’s not like the engine battery guy was bad. We brought the engine battery problem to him and he took perfect care of it. We didn’t know about the “other” problem yet.) The corrosion went deep; right into the wires. Carl charged us for 2 hours labor and nothing else. He set us free. Thank you Carl.
We drove the final ten miles to the park. We had a momentary discomfort, and thought maybe the Campground Gremlins had struck when we finally pulled in to Ridgway State Park at 7pm and found our campsite already occupied, but it was just a nice couple from Olathe who had been extending their stay day-by-day until we finally arrived. (We have been delayed getting here and this is the third day of our reservation.) Our new-found friends were prepared to leave at a moment’s notice and they did. The park welcomed us with a nice sunset.
Simple.
yet dramatic.
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