I would have posted this in the "What did you do today?" thread, but.....
For those of you RVers, contemplating RVing, or especially contemplating full-time RVing, you just never know what you are going to have to deal with! Sometimes it gets a little hairy!
Yep, our motorhome on a flat-bed trailer. Why? Because we'd had a heat-induced brake failure the afternoon before and didn't trust that the wheels would turn properly under a more normal tow.
Spent the night at a Walmart (first time ever - and we've been RVing since 2003). Big flat-bed tow truck came by today to pick us up!
Wait a minute! It's too tall!!!! Yep, it really is. But the tow driver was extremely confident about the 20 mile route, and that if we were under 15 feet in height, we'd be OK. Final height (after dumping the air bags) - 14 feet 9 inches
We're lucky - our motorhome has a relatively low height for a Class A - 11 foot 9 inches, and we managed to drop another 3 to 4 inches by dumping the airbags. Yes - the tow people climbed up and measured the drop to the ground.
So who got to drive it up onto the flat bed? - I did!
The tow guys were very careful to get out of the parking lot (and to clear some low lines) and onto the freeway, but once they hit the freeway they went flat-out at 75 mph! WHAT!!! I felt like I was having to floor the jeep to keep up. I think we were driving into a headwind too!
No problems with clearance - on the freeway I think we had at least 20 foot overpasses, and a few lights with pretty high clearances as well - 18 feet? Standard height limit for vehicles is 13 foot by the way.
Our emergency road service had found us a place to stay Sunday (the Walmart), got a tow to take us there - that didn't quite work, but we carefully drove there with tow truck "escort". Just barely made it.
Then in the morning the emergency road service found us a service place 20 miles away in Tupelo MS and found the right kind of tow to take us there and sent them out. We double checked with the service place that they really could handle our equipment.
Got to the truck service place just fine. More excitement for me backing the motorhome off the trailer. Yep - we got our ladder out so I could climb up into the motorhome on the trailer.
Coach-net did a great job of finding the right service shop - we have an unusual breaking system for a Diesel Class A. The shop was able to start work right after lunch. The mechanics were fabulous. They did a very thorough inspection of each wheel, each break, all the ABS sensors (one had been pushed out). All that was fine. Then started checking other things.
Problem? Our brake pedal wasn't always returning properly so sometimes ALL the brakes were dragging - yikes!
Once they found the culprit, they took the linkage apart, cleaned it up, greased it, added a zerk to grease it in the future. It turns out other owners have complained about there being problems and no way to grease the linkage. The mechanics just knew exactly what to do.
Cost of repair? $300 bucks (man those truck mechanics are way cheaper than RV mechanics!). No parts. Anyone who has motorhome service done knows this is very, very cheap. Cost of tow - already paid for by our emergency service membership. I think today's tow probably pays for the 7 years of membership fees that we have already paid - we are paid up through 2012.
Even though we've had the membership for over 4 years, this is the first time we used it mainly because we really were in an emergency situation. Normally we talk to the manufacturer of whichever sub-system requires service and have them tell us where to go. We were very impressed by Coach Net - especially with them finding the right shop because we've had trouble finding places to service our brakes in the past.
After repair and a few local "tests" we decided to return to the same Walmart and just see how things went. No problems! All tires stayed cool. No funny smells, no warning lights, no weird noises. So here we are enjoying another fine evening in the Walmart parking lot. Fingers crossed on our longer run tomorrow - just to West Memphis AR, less than 100 miles.
I think overall we have been very, very, very lucky.
Audrey
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