Sometimes We're Lucky

Because we live on the road in our Prevost bus conversion, Ed and I have the luxury of meeting new people and exploring places most people would never experience. This luxury doesn’t come without responsibility and much of that responsibility falls on Ed. He takes care of the coach.

Ed keeps the 225 gallon fuel tank full of diesel at the Flying J Truck Stops. He fills our water tank so I never need to go a day without a shower. And, he has the dirty job of emptying our holding tanks. I look to him for reassurance that turning on an appliance or the printer won’t blow a circuit breaker when we’re plugged into an electric source.

We haven’t needed to do any major repairs since our visit to the Prevost facility last October for brakes and assorted other repairs to make the coach road ready and safe. Then, on Sunday night, the generator would not make power. That meant no microwave for cooking an egg breakfast and no hot water for a morning shower. We’d use the limited power of the inverter for any electricity.

We were boondocked in Greenville, Illinois in a parking lot. The sign in the store-front window was left behind from a Dodge auto dealership that once operated there. There was nothing I could do about the generator, so I busied myself updating our spending in QuickBooks. Ed puzzled over the failed generator.

“I can’t figure it out,” he announced, “so I’m going for a walk.” Moments later he called me from the VFW. “Do you want to come over for a beer?” I declined. Beer vs. accounting, I do sometimes have discipline.

When Ed returned, he was elated and it wasn’t from the cold Miller Genuine Draft. The fellow at the VFW told him about a RV generator repair shop in the very town where we had stopped for the night. How’s that for luck!

At 8 AM on Monday morning, diagnostic work began on the generator at TNT RV repair. By 1 PM, the technician installed a new voltage regulator and the generator was fixed. Now, what are the chances that the generator would go bad in a town in Illinois where a skilled technician was handy? Sometimes we are lucky!

May 5, 2008