After reading yesterday’s blog, RVing’s Top 10, my friend Connie Bradish suggested maybe we needed a Bottom 10 list, and suggested, in no particular order:

1. A major dumping event, like the hose comes off and it’s all over.
2. A tire blowout, especially if it’s the right front tire.
3. Being sunk up to your rear axles in a designated camping spot.
4. Being sunk up to your axles in a non-camping spot.
5. Dragging the tow car behind the RV because it’s still in gear.
6. Driving a back road, and coming up to a bridge with a 10 foot maximum clearance, you need 13 feet and you have to stop, unhitch and turn the coach around, all while blocking traffic.
7. Driving a road you shouldn’t be on, like the southwest road around Lake Tahoe in you big RV and tow car.
8. Having a husband and wife disagreement while backing into a site, accompanied by funny hand signals from one partner to another.
9. Having a pet get out, and you can’t find them.
10. Hitting a low rock, post or cone, or an overhang of a building or a tree, damaging your coach.

Connie admitted that she and her husband Pete have scored 10 out of 10 on this list. I think we’ve missed just one, which is having a pet slip out the door, never to be found. When Miss Terry’s cat, Sasquatch was still with us, he was quite the escape artist, but he never went far.

But 9 out of 10 on the Rock Bottom list isn’t a bad (or in this case, good) record. Less than a week into our fulltming life, we were camped in a fairgrounds in Torrington, Wyoming, on our way to Life on Wheels in Moscow, Idaho. We had the place to ourselves, so I had nobody but myself to blame when I pulled out of our site and turned too soon, swinging the back end of our shiny new Pace Arrow motorhome into the concrete pedestal that held the water and electric hookups.   

I was just sick, and to Miss Terry’s credit, she didn’t shoot me, or even thump me with a rolling pin. Believe me, there was nothing she could have said to me that was worse than I was calling myself. I was still kicking myself three days later when we got to Moscow, where I met Dick Reed, founder of the RV Driving School. When I told him my sad tale of woe, Dick took my by the hand and led me to the back of the row where the instructors’ RVs were parked.

“Do you see the ding in that one,” Dick asked. “That belongs to Bill Farlow. Bill did that on a tree stump last year. This one here is Charlie Minshall’s rig. See that ding? Lord know what Charlie hit. And this one here, with the dented bumper belongs to…” By the time our tour was finished, I felt a lot better about my own mishap, and I had made a friend for life.

We’ve been stuck and we’ve been really stuck, and it’s never fun. This picture was taken at an RV park in Ohio a few years back. It had been raining for days, and we were nervous about pulling onto grass, but when we arrived, the park owner told us another bus had just left the same site. It must have been a Volkswagen bus, because our MCI promptly sunk up to its rear axle!

But anybody can get stuck in soft ground. In Bremerton, Washington, I proved that it is possible to drive a bus up a hill so steep that your front tires are on the pavement, and your rear bumper is digging into the pavement, but your drive tires are three inches in the air!

I also proved that while you can drive into that situation, you cannot drive back out of it! Getting out requires a very large tow truck, the police department to stop traffic, the fire department’s haz-mat crew to clean up the 36 gallons of radiator coolant that spills when the the tow truck cable snags a hose, and the local news crew. Did I mention I was going the wrong way up a one way street at the time?

When all was said and done, I asked the police officer in charge of the scene how big a ticket I was getting, and he replied “What with the tow bill, the radiator coolant you need to buy, the hose you need to replace, and the roses you’ll need to buy your wife to make up for this, I couldn’t in good faith give you a ticket. I’m a married man too!”

I also remember driving out of one of our first RV parks, and how everybody waved at us as we drove past. I commented to Terry about how nice everybody was, and wave right back. It wasn’t until I got to the street and glanced in my rear view mirrors that I noticed that I had left all of our window awnings out. Of course, at that point there was no way I was going to stop and get out, so I just drove away, while poor MIs Terry hung out the windows unhooking the awnings as we went!

So yeah, I could easily do a Rock Bottom 10 – been there, done that, and a few more. How about you? What were some of your worst RVing goofs?

Thought For The Day – Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.

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We left Bowling Green State University Friday morning, and though I had been worried that we might get stuck in the field where we were parked, we got out just fine. We stopped for fuel, then drove north about ten miles on Interstate 75, skirted the west edge of Toledo on Interstate 475, then picked up U.S. Highway 23 and followed it north into Michigan.

The line at the dump station in Bowling Green was really long, so we decided to stop at the Cabela’s Outfitters in Dundee, Michigan, about 45 miles north of Bowling Green, to use their dump station. Apparently quite a few other folks from the FMCA rally had the same idea, because there were several motorhomes waiting to dump. We also needed to make a bank deposit, so we unhooked the van and Miss Terry ran off to do that errand while I waited in line to dump. She needn’t have hurried, because I was still in line when she got back.

Several rigs ahead of me pulled up, dumped, and quickly went on their way, but you know there always has to be one jerk in every crowd. A guy in a big diesel pusher pulled up to the dump station, got out, didn’t like his position, got back inside his coach and maneuvered around a bit, got back out, still didn’t like where he was, and repeated the process again. Then he puttered around, opened his sewer bay, closed it, went back inside his coach, came back out, opened the sewer bay again, then opened several other bays until he found his rubber gloves and put them on.

Then he took out his sewer hose, hooked it to his tank outlet, realized that it was too short, and went to two other coaches until he could find somebody to loan him an extra length of hose and a connector, which he attached to his hose and finally dumped. That chore done, he rinsed out the hoses, unhooked the loaner hose, unhooked his sewer hose, replaced it in the bay, returned the loaner hose, went back to his rig and opened two bay doors before he decided where he wanted to put his gloves, changed his mind and got them back out and put them in a different bay, and finally got inside his coach. And sat there. And then he sat there some more. People started blowing their horns and the fellow ahead of me was ready to do him bodily harm before the fool finally drove off and the line moved forward, and eventually I was next in line to dump.

That was when an idiot in an SUV pulling an Airstream trailer came the other way through the parking lot and tried to shoehorn himself in behind the rig that was finishing dumping. No way was that going to happen, and Bad Nick went flying out of the bus to explain the facts of life to the guy behind the wheel. Meanwhile, the air was split with blaring horns as people who had waited patiently in line let the offender know that he wasn’t going to get away with that!

He decided to play dumb and said “Oh, are all of you waiting to dump? I’m sorry,” before beating a hasty retreat.

We wasted an hour at the dump station, but eventually got back onto the highway and followed it north until it joined Interstate 75. Traffic was heavy all the way from Toledo to Bay City, with some particularly bad stretches in Ann Arbor and Flint, where nobody seemed to know what a yield sign, a turn signal, or a rearview mirror was for.

By the time we turned west on U.S. Highway 10 at Bay City, I was more than ready to get on a slower paced road. An hour later we joined State Highway 115 and took it to U.S. Highway 131 near Cadillac, and with a couple more zigs and zags down two lane highways we arrived at my cousin Terry Cook’s place just south of Traverse City about 6:30 p.m., having logged just over 300 miles.

We backed into our usual spot in Terry’s driveway, received warm greetings from the entire family, and hooked up to water and electric. We’ll be here for a few days as Miss Terry has her annual visit to her oncologist, and we enjoy some time relaxing with family. After being up early every morning at the FMCA rally, the first order of business will be to turn the telephones off and sleep late every morning!

Thought For The Day – Over prepare, and then go with the flow.

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