In all of our travels, we have been blessed with very little problems. Either with our car, our RV or our health (sans a couple of small visits to the ER for me). We arrived in Belfair on Friday afternoon, beautiful weather, park is gorgeous, our site is good and we are close to Stephanie and family.
After we parked the RV we found we could not get the big living room slide to go out. No electrical sound coming from it at all! So Deane pulled the switch to get to the wires, pulled out his electrical testing thingy, and checked to see if there was power at the switch and if the switch was doing what it was suppose to. It proved to be good, so next step was to find the motor that pushes the slide out and see if it was working. The manual provided with our rig was obviously written for a different model, because we could not locate what the manual said should be there.
As he had his head buried in the bowels of the RV, a Mobile RV Repair guy drove by. We stopped him and he worked with Deane for about 1/2 hour. He also could not figure it out or find the wires the manual said were suppose to be there. So at $80 hour, Deane decided he could guess as good as he could and sent him on his way.
After a call to a place in California specializing in Alpha repairs, Deane found the motor and correct wires and started to manually crank the slide out. Try to imagine this.... Deane on his knees, head buried deep in the basement compartment with a 14" crescent wrench, trying to crank out the room. He could only get about a third of a revolution at a time which moved the slide about an inch. Two inches out, he emerged to find an extension to the wrench when I decided to try the button again. And, amazingly, the electrical motor caught and the slide started to move out. Our jaws dropped as we watched and we prayed it would go all the way. It did!
Slide out..... we finished setting up, and Steph, Mike and Jayden came to visit a couple of hours later.
Next day, beautiful weather again and we were going to watch both boys play their first tournament baseball games. We followed Steph and Mike to the ball field for Jayden's game first. Was a great game, in 4 innings they were up by 10 runs, so the 10 run rule was imposed and a win was declared for Jayden's team. As we got back to the parking lot we discovered the back window of our car had been broken and my purse, jacket and Joshua's I-touch pad had been stolen. I stupidly left my purse in the back, covered by a jacket. Dumb!!!!!!
Of course this was a holiday weekend, so no one was available to fix it then. We got all the glass out and have been driving around for three days with no back window (Could not bring myself to put in plastic). We found a mobile window repair guy, and he is coming out Wednesday to install the new window.
After the sheriff left, we headed back to the state park to start calling credit card companies. By the time we got to them, the thieves had already started charging. We were surprised when Bank of America called us before we called them. They saw suspicious usage on the cards and called to verify. What great service. One more that was surprising was Amazon.com. Apparently the thieves tried to open an account using one of the cards and Amazon decided it was fraud, canceled the order and account then sent us an advising email.
Got all of the cards cancelled, fraud notices on credit reports, now I need to replace all of the other things that were in my wallet. Biggest scare is that I had just received my Medicare card and it has my social security number on it.
After all of that, our first day "on the job" here at the park was a challenge! Our counterpart's have Monday and Tuesday's off, so we are responsible for two thirds of the park on those days. Monday, July 4th, most of the campers were leaving and we had to clean about 70 sites by ourselves. This gig is not going to be as easy as the ones we have done before. We are actually going to have to really work for our site. :-)
The people here are great, very friendly and the Rangers actually acknowledge you. We are on Hood Canal where we have access to oyster beds and clamming. There is a warning to not eat the oysters picked from this beach raw, they must be cooked. The clams have no warning and if you are under 14 you do not need a license. Guess who we are going to get to go clamming? We did buy one license, so Deane is legal to dig, but he has no interest in doing it. His remark was, that I was welcome to dig both oysters and clams and eat them. He would watch and see, and if I did not get sick, he would imbibe the next time! HA!
When life here finally gets into a routine, we are looking forward to exploring the peninsula, especially the rain forest, Hurricane Ridge and some of the islands in the sound. And of course we will be sharing our experiences with all of you.