An Accident Waiting To Happen

Monday (yesterday) was moving day. Denny and I was ready for the change, hoping to get back to a regular campground and away from traffic. We routed ourselves on state roads, knowing the going would be slow because of traffic and traffic signals, but we were only going about 95 miles so we decided to take the time.

Traffic wasn't horrible and the traffic signals became fewer and fewer as we headed towards the middle of the state. Occasionally we even left the towns behind and drove through areas that had yet to be developed, which was nice. We pulled into the campground around noon and discovered yet another campground that had converted to a park heavily leaning towards permanently established trailers. So permanent, in fact, that a school bus arrives daily to pick up and drop off kids. There is a separate section for RVs, and that's where we were placed.

I pointed out the suggested route to getting to our site to Denny, who took it upon himself to go a different way. That was fine until he tried to make a turn that was too sharp and one that had a fence on our right side. He found the fence with our folding entry steps and popped out a fence board from the pressure of moving forward. A handyman was driving by and took care of the board and we proceeded to try to find a way to our row that didn't involved making a hairpin turn. When we finally got to our site we discovered it was a relatively narrow site with overhanging tree limbs and trees at the rear. I pulled out the walkie talkies and Denny started to back in. When I realized that at the current angle Denny was going to clip a tree with the right upper corner of the rig, I pushed the walkie talkie button and told him to stop. Stop. Stop. STOP, STOP, STOP, STOP, STOP!!! Apparently the battery was dead in his walkie talkie and only the fact that a lady standing across the street waved and shouted to Denny made him stop in time--by about one inch. Lots of snarling at each other and we tried again, this time with hand signals. Got the trailer backed in, only to find there wasn't enough clearance on one side to open the kitchen slide (need that one open to cook and access the refrigerator!). So more maneuvering on Denny's part (doing a great job, by the way) and we were in.

Then came the unhitching. I raised the rig, Denny pulled the hitch release and started to drive off. Only this time instead of stopping after pulling away from the king pin he kept driving with the power cable and emergency breakaway cord still attached to the truck. I hollered "Denny, stop, stop, stop,STOP, STOP, STOP G*DDAMMIT STOP!!!" This time he didn't hear and so the breakaway switch got pulled out, but not the power cable, thank goodness. More snarling and fault finding followed. (We get over this quickly, it's also part of the routine on a bad day) I'm sure our audience (because you can be darn sure everyone was covertly watching and listening after the first series of "STOP STOOP STOP") was quite entertained. Certainly Denny and I would have been in their place. But we got all set up, dragged out over one hundred feet of cable to be able to set up our TV and Internet satellite dishes out in a clearing in the storage area to be able to get away from the tall trees and we were good to go. Whew. Because before we found the clearing I had been trying to call other campgrounds to move to in place of this one and they were all full. The joy of being in Florida in February when half the population of Ohio heads south to enjoy the sun.

There was one other thing to do, and that was repair the entry step which had gotten bent from pulling against that fence. Denny got that fixed with a little old fashioned muscle (and I never said a word about that ill-fated, badly chosen route he took to get to our site, although my tongue hurts like all-get-out).

So we're here, we're staying and right now it's raining so I'm going to relax with some Internet surfing and stupid computer games.