Saturday, June 18, 2011

A Day at the Doctor (RV Doctor that is)

 A couple of days ago, it was time to empty the black tank and well the ole girl just seemed constipated. Pulled the handle on the tank and nothing, not that lovely sound of rushing stuff through the hose, just dead silence. Of course my first thought was, oh this isn't good. Well after trying several different home remedies, she just wouldn't give it up, so an appointment was made with the doc. Our appointment was yesterday so we hooked up and made it to the doctors office around 10:00 for what should have been a 2 hour procedure. Sparing you the gorey details, 6 hours later, she was ready. The diagnosis, lets just say she was really constipated. Seems the previous owner (not a true RVer) who just lived in the trailer, thought it was ok to leave the black tank valve open all the time (which we were unaware of). Well, as all you fellow RVers, know what that leads to, yup, 6 hours of flushing out the tank and a new valve.
  
 Knowing the surgery was going to take a good cut out of our wallet, we decided to rub salt in our wound and spend a couple of hours at the DMV. You see we have been in New Mexico of over three years now and finally decided to get our Drivers License's, heck we had nothing else to do. We thought spending a few hours with a bunch of happy like minded individuals was just what we needed to take our mind off our Scout being at the doctors office. We both walked away with a shiny new Drivers License and are now official New Mexicans.

A quick word on our choice to become New Mexico residents. Most folks in the fulltime RV world have their residency in FL, TX, SD and other states with no income tax. We chose to stay in NM, as all of Sheryl's doctors are here, the cost of living is low, taxes are low as well as vehicles registrations, etc. We did live in TX for a while and learned, even though there in no state income tax, the state sure gets their money out of you in various other ways, so it works out about the same in the end.
 

So towards the end of the day and with her digestive system feeling all better, we made it back to our spot at Holloman AFB. When we pulled up, I thought, we don't have any pictures of our new rig and our new truck together. So a couple of shots later and here they are. This was also our first time pulling the Scout with Big Red, and as you could imagine, she did just fine with her Cumins Diesel engine.

One last thing we discovered during our hook up and travel to the shop, is the front landing gear is shot and needs to be replaced. We had the repair shop order us a new system and it will be installed next week. (more on that later) We also knew going in that buying a pre owned rig, you take a chance with things going wrong. Good news is, shes paid for, so no big payments on top of issues coming up, and we also budgeted for any fixes that may rear their ugly head. Life is still good, just with a little lighter wallet

That's all for this installment, we'll see you next time and of course, keep Lovin Your Life as we do ours. 

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Glad the doctor was able to do his job. That's not the kind of "present" you want from the former owners. The rig's lookin' good!
Nina

debbowers said...

Wow - you guys have really changed your living arrangements since we were in El Paso! Very nice! So glad to hear that everything is going so much better with Sheryl (and glad to hear that the plumbing issues are resolved - nothing worse than black tank problems). Sheryl - check out this quilt pattern - I saw a quilt done like this at a quilt shop today (except with smaller circles) and it's so cute - it's also a quilt as you go quilt - so once it's pieced it's done! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gKvdrexKE4

Deb :)

Paul and Marti Dahl said...

Eeww!

Paul and Marti Dahl said...

Don't you just love having to clean up other peoples...problems?

True, there is always something with a pre-owned RV, but then we've had a couple of new ones that were riddled with bugs that took a lot of time to work out.

The pictures look great of the truck and fiver together, a nice "package" (and I don't mean a package like tha NY Congressman posted on Twitter).

Best of luck with the new team, I know you'll enjoy the travels.