The Scratch

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Denver NC

This has been a busy week for us, and not an entirely pleasant one. But for the company of Candace and Kate it might have been very unpleasant.

Candace

Kate

We arrived here from the Charleston area last Sunday. On Monday my sister Candace and I drove down to Columbia SC to pick up the new rig, currently known as The Suitcase because of it's small size. (Peg is unhappy with the name, so we need to come up with a new one.) The old rig was parked in a golf course lot next to my sister's property, and Peg spent the day unloading it, moving it one carton at a time into Candace's half of the garage.

The purchase was supposed to go smoothly, and it almost did. I had a blank check signed by Peg, the funds were in her account and she had called the bank that morning to make sure there would be no problem. There was a problem of course. The branch manager in Columbia said they couldn't honor a blank check, and contrary to what we believed, I was not on her account. So we spent about 2 hours sitting in one branch while she went to another branch to transfer funds. My bank does not seem to have any branches in the Carolinas. Not that I have seen anyway. Another good reason to have separate bank accounts.

The new rig eventually made it home fine with a shiny new temporary South Carolina plate and we made arrangements to have the  Vesta put on consignment. Several days later my sister and I took off for a relatively quick trip to drop off the rig at a consignment dealer while Peg continued to sort stuff in the garage. We weren't far into our trip when I noticed that the Vesta had a terrible loss of power but we kept going. Eventually a check engine light came on. We pulled over and put a call into Navistar, the engine manufacturer. There is a recall on this engine for a minor fix, and I knew about the recall, but did not intend to pursue it, figuring new owners could do that. And the gods laughed. We limped back home. By the time we got home the engine light had gone off and the engine had perked up. But I made arrangements anyway to get it looked at, at a truck place about 45 minutes away.

The following day my sister and I headed up north to the truck place, while Peg worked in the garage sorting stuff and filling up the new rig.

We got to the truck place ok. The engine, by the way, was running just as well as it always did. I had to do a 3 point back up and turn to get the Vestea on the correct side of the building. That's when I did this.

I scraped against a gate cleverly camouflaged a bright yellow. The screeching noise didn't register until I had completely defaced the entire right side of the rig. In my defense, I had seen the gate, but by only being able to see it in my convex mirrors I totally misjudged, and didn't actually see, the end of the pole on the gate. If Peg had been here she wouldn't have let this happen since she is hyper-aware of the multitude of ways that I can invite disaster.

We got the name of a local shop that could do the work and schlepped the rig on down the road to talk with them. They can fix it, good as new, they said. How expensive? Won't know until we get bids in. Will take 2-3 weeks to fix. The good news is that they take consignment, so they became my new consignment place and I won't have to move the rig once they are done with it.

So we took the Vesta back to the truck place to have the engine looked at, with the understanding that the RV place would send someone to pick it up when it was ready. Apparently the recall fix was what was needed to restore engine power, because they sent the rig on down to the consignment place and didn't mention a bill.

By the time we got home Peg was getting ready to start making phone calls to find us. She didn't yell at me. In fact she was very nonplussed. I think she was just exhausted from all the work in the garage. It took me awhile, after my initial meltdown, but I realized that it's only a "scratch", it's a thing that can be fixed. It isn't cancer, and nobody died. Except maybe my good insurance record. I might have killed that.