Wouldn't you know I should have replaced those back tires

Well, Gallup New Mexico wasn’t where we intended to stay the night, but heck, that tire store won’t open till tomorrow…

 

We were driving down the road enjoying ourselves with a good family book when we heard this huge explosion like sound. Jonathan thought the refrigerator exploded. I pulled over quickly, and we started looking around. Sure enough, our right inside tire – one of the ones we chose to NOT replace until next year had blow out. It had great tread still – It was all over the road like the remains of a tire grenade. Ugh, we should have had those replaced…

 

Let me tell you something about RVs that we learned today.

 

When a back tire on an RV explodes, it takes a lot of stuff with it… The muffler got beat-up and bent. The Wheel well got blasted and the two nearby compartments are now crunched in a bit where they meet up with the wheel well. There are also a bunch of wire bundles that go through that area. Now they don’t..

 

We were actually pretty lucky though. It was just our automatic step and refrigerator that stopped working  --- Funny how electrical devices are so picky about getting their wiring blown up and dragged down the highway. They just don’t like that and pretty much refuse to work after that. Step – Not a big deal. Refrigerator – Sort of a big deal. Missing tire – Pretty big deal.

 

SO we called Triple A to help with changing the tire – Luckily we had a spare since the Navajo reservation where we stopped is a little short on RV tires. Unfortunately, the previous owners who bought the current tires had bought a size slightly larger than the tires that were on the vehicle originally. Of course they did NOT buy a spare tire, they just kept the slightly SMALLER spare tire. Second NOTE about RVs – They usually have TWO tires on each side of the back axel and they pretty much need to all be the SAME size.  We put it on anyway.

 

After driving back to Gallup, NM where they had things like tire stores, Walmart, and HomeDepot, we found a place that would sell tires the proper size and in the proper quantity. (It’s amazing why a store would have (1) tire of a certain size.. Are there a lot of people driving unicycle trucks out there who only want NEW tires?) But luckily Gallup has some sane folks selling tires too, and we found someone who could help. Of course he was on his way out and we need to come back tomorrow to get them put on.

 

So this gave us plenty of time to shop at Home Depot for wiring materials. (For those of you who don’t know, Lowes and Home Depot are our favorite vacation spots – we spend a lot of our RV vacationing time at these stores. We’ve bought light knobs, aluminum pipes for when the kids broke our bed wrestling, screws, brackets, tools and other remodeling stuff. We’ve seen them all up and down the west coast last summer and were excited to see how the Gallup stores faired.) And as usual, it was like buying tickets to Disneyland. I came out of the store with two plastic bags and $150 less.

 

Out in the parking lot, Deanna had the Refrigerator access panel pulled off. We were looking the tell-tale signs of something missing from someplace that looked like it needed something stuck into. After finding some promising looking wire sized holes, we tried to figure out how the heck the wire mess hanging from the wheel well ever got to the place we had found. Had it ever – who knew – There was even a few other wires hanging around that looked like they hadn’t been connected in years? Were those important? Maybe the previous owners did their own repair work like us!

 

Well I figured a little experimental wire check was in order before I tried to rethread everything the professional way. There was a DC 12 +/- set of clamps that were lonely looking, so I figured what the heck, maybe we’d get lucky. I cut a couple lengths of promising looking wire I had picked up from Lowes and stuck them from the 12volt house battery to the fridge. And hey, it worked! The fridge got its DC juice it wanted and fired up the propane converter. (I’m still amazed that a fridge can run on propane.) Of course this was the TEST run. The wires were running out the house door along the outside wall of the RV and into the access panel. Since the sun was going down and the fridge was working, I decided I shouldn’t mess with this great getto job, so I just taped the wires in place and left them. (I told the kids not to trip on the wires running in through the door.) Deanna was of course thrilled that we didn’t have to empty the fridge tonight.

 

Important Tip on RV fridges – Never leave food like uncooked chicken in a Fridge that stops working – We did that last year and the chicken defrosted and found a way into various cracks and cranies of the freezers door panel. Add some El Paso summer heat and wal-LA! You’ve got the most nasty smell invented on the planet earth wafting through the RV. It took loads of Arm&Hammer, with plenty of bleech water injected through a turkey baister to finally get that smell gone! So no, Deanna didn’t mind the ugly ghetto-tape & wire job to get the fridge back online. We’ll have some time to reroute the wires and make it look more presentable soon.

 

We’ll wish us luck on those tires tomorrow. As much as we love being handy, it’d be fun to spend the rest of the trip out of maintenance/repair mode.