The last week in our house was well, taxing. Remember how I mentioned that it felt like our belongings were reproducing overnight? Not only that, but Steve worked Monday & Tuesday. That left me & four kids & a house to empty AND clean. The buyers had not asked us to clean the house in the contract, but when we had moved into our house nearly nine years ago, it was dirty, and I was annoyed. The buyers offered full price on the house, and they requested that we do a walk-through with them to give them some home-care tips, and I really wanted them to be happy & me to not be embarrassed...& I'm pretty sure we were exhaling dirt because my work was multiplying, it seemed!
Wednesday rolled around, Steve was off, and we had the house to finish emptying, clean, AND we had to go get the RV from storage, drive it to Hickory Creek, and set it up. We arranged babysitting for the girls and headed off to get the RV. Crazy busy & stressed, off we went. I decided to bring Jake because I
didn't know how long things would take, and he's still little & totable. Because Steve had the back seat of the truck filled with our stuff, I drove the traverse with Jake & followed him. We arrived at storage, and of course, the owners were not there, and we needed to check out & get our deposit back. We called the owner & proceeded to the RV.
Upon arrival, there was a guy parked immediately behind us bemoaning the hail damage on his RV. Not only were there dings on his, but skylights had busted, as well. Of course, that had us on edge, but when Steve investigated, our RV had fared just fine. On to getting hitched...of course the battery had died since the about 3 weeks prior use, so I pulled the Traverse around to give it a boost so we could actually hitch up. Steve was annoyed to say the least. And we were having trouble. First we hadn't raised the RV enough to hitch properly, then we raised it too much. A couple of attempts to hitch with no success, and then finally, I saw it go in. Steve responded that it had not made a big enough noise, but of course the truck was running, the traverse was running, and I figured that had made it difficult to hear well. I called him out to look at the hitch, and we decided that it was indeed hitched. Steve hopped back in the truck, put it in drive, and the RV slid out of the hitch & landed on the truck. Yep, you read that correctly. Major flub number one. Seriously, who makes the mistake of thinking they have hitched their RV properly when in fact, not so much??!? Inner panic ensued as well as fervent prayer. Umm...I did tell him I saw it go in (& I did) & the little “lock” come across behind it (& I did), but it was NOT properly hitched, and we were suddenly in a bind. Should have taken a picture, & I even thought about it, but I didn't have the camera, and well, you can just imagine it in your mind, right? The RV was resting on the siderails of the back of the truck, and the tailgate was pretty well crumpled. We had already raised up the jacks, so we attempted to raise the RV back up & lower the jacks, but in our panic & inexperience, we didn't do it properly, and we couldn't get it to raise up off of the truck. More panic & prayers, & we jumped in the traverse & headed to the RV lot just around the corner to ask for help. Yeah, the guy in the service department was sure we would need a forklift to lift the RV off of the truck, and he told us we'd have to wait until someone returned from lunch that could help us.
I sat with Jake in the lounge area while Steve went out to look at other 5th wheels to see if we he could figure out what to do. I stayed & prayed, and a little while later, he called & told me to come. Back in the traverse, back to the RV, and this time, a little more clear-headed, we lowered the jacks properly so that we could raise up the RV off of the truck. And shockingly, the RV appeared to sustain no damage, only one side rail of the truck ended up with a dent in it, and the only real dilemma was how to open the tailgate & remove it so that we could actually pull the truck away from the RV. More prayers, lots of inner turmoil, tears sliding down my cheeks, texts to my dear friend watching the girls, screams from the baby, and yet...miraculously, Steve & I worked together & we got the tailgate removed from the truck. We did not yell at each other, nor did we blame each other for what happened. I'm going to call that victory!! We hitched once more, and yes, we tested it with the jacks still down (lesson learned!), and off we went to our first campsite. And yes, I shed a few more tears as I drove behind Steve, looking at our new home bouncing along the road.
At our campsite, we unhitched, unloaded more of our stuff into the RV, hopped back into the Traverse, and back to the house to try to finish the last “easy” loads of laundry in the comfort of our own home, more purging of the final bits of stuff, more cleaning...it never ends. Then we got the girls back, loaded up, back to the RV to discover that we only had power in the middle of the RV...no lights in either of the bedrooms, and there was this strange loud humming sound...turns out the problem was blown fuses, but at the time...well, we were exhausted & due to our earlier adventures of the day, we hadn't finished all we needed at the house. We fell into bed somehow, amidst all the stuff everywhere that we couldn't even see since we had no lights, and called it a day! A memorable one at that!
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