Between a Rock and a Hard Place

I'm sitting on the banks of the Mississippi River in a downpour, amid flood warnings, waiting for RV dealers to open up because we have a problem.

Yesterday when we arrived in West Memphis, Arkansas I started to open the kitchen slideout and noticed that our flooring was ripping as the slide out was moving out. I stopped it, called Denny in and we tried to figure out what was going on. At first I thought one of my carving knives had fallen out of the knife rack and had gotten caught up under the slide, digging it into the floor. Getting down on our bellies showed us one of the roller brackets/mountings under the slideout had broken. Gah! Since the slideout was already half way out we tried to put a piece of board under the metal mount to lift it--no dice. The floor and flooring were already damaged so we just put the slideout all the way out.

We are en route to Albuquerque to visit Denny's sister and to do some house maintenance and repairs for her, so I called her to see if we could stay with her if we had to leave the rig for several days at a dealership out there. That was fine. Okay, it's too late to call the dealership so I'll do that tomorrow. No sleep, thunderstorms started at 3AM. Up at 4:30AM to brainstorm. At 7AM our time I called our service department in Elkhart, Indiana to see what could be done. The verdict? 7-14 days to order the flooring, 2 days to repair the slideouts. However, the service department has moved and they do not have hook ups for us to camp and wait until they re-open after the Thanksgiving weekend and the local campground closes tomorrow. Great. Once we close the kitchen slideout we're afraid to open it again, but it will take four days to get to Albuquerque and three more for the dealership to open so that's seven days without access to our stove, microwave and refrigerator. Hmm. I can live with the torn flooring but the slideout has to be fixed.

Next option; call local Memphis RV service departments--a two month waiting list. Mississippi, same deal. Arkansas, the same. I hit pay dirt at a dealership in Oklahoma City, but we'd have to wait until Monday. Okay, I guess we're going to be eating out a lot until after this slideout is repaired. In the pouring rain (deluge, actually) we pulled in the slideouts (cringing the entire time) and lifted the jacks and off we headed for western Arkansas. And now that we're set up for the night, it's time to start cancelling campground reservations and apologizing to Denny's sister; we'll still try to make it out there to take care of a couple of her repairs, but it will be a case of getting those jobs done and then heading for Mesa, Arizona. Albuquerque is going to be awfully darned cold and possibly snowy in December and we don't want to linger. And doesn't this always happen when I make pre-paid, non-refundable reservations?

At least there's a steakhouse just around the corner from the campground--that's where I'm heading for dinner tonight!