The Concept of Neighbors

One of the first things that we noticed about rvers, after we purchased our first motorhome, was that how helpful they are. If you were to walk around a campground and see a motorhome with its engine hood up, within minutes there would be a group of men gathered around peering inside the engine compartment. Pretty soon someone would walk away and return with the specific tool needed to attempt to repair whatever might have been wrong and after some tinkering and talk the problem would be fixed. You can be assured that if you have a problem and stand around scratching your head, pretty soon someone will be by to help you fix it.

Denny and I experienced this first hand this week. I had mentioned (okay, ranted about) our problem in getting our satellite Internet system up and running. We feared we had broken the feed arm when the tripod leg broke and the satellite dish and feed horn smashed to the ground. Online acquaintances Bill and Diane e-mailed us that they were in our area and had a spare feed horn and that we were welcome to come pick it up and try it on our dish to see if that was our problem in getting online. Bill and I have been e-mailing each other for 2 years when we came within a hairsbreadth of meeting each other in Ocean City, Washington but we've never seen each other. Being able to substitute a feed arm on our system would allow us to know whether or not the feed arm was the problem, so we gratefully accepted their offer. Both Bill and Diane were suffering from bad colds but they graciously came out to visit and loan us the feed horn when we stopped by. The two of them exemplify the friendly, caring folks you meet on the road on a daily basis, which is one of the reasons Denny and I don't miss our old neighborhood so much--we have a new neighborhood and neighbors wherever we stop for the week.

Thanks to Bill and Diane, we discovered that our feed arm wasn't broken and after much moving of the dish and fussing with the cables and new cable ends and connectors Denny finally got the satellite dish up and aimed and functioning properly. And it only took two and a half days to do it. Sigh.

Next--get that slow leak in the right rear tire fixed. Sooner or later these bumps in the road will smooth out, right?