Dreary Traveling Day and Mr. Murphy Tagged Along

Location: Pelham, AL (High 53, Low 27)

The main story of the traveling portion of yesterday was rain and dreary skies. We were lucky that it didn’t outright pour, so it wasn’t a difficult trip really. But really dark – I so much prefer sunny skies!! (I suspect I’m not alone in this!) But other than that, we had an uneventful trip.

 

 

 

 

 

Unfortunately, Mr. Murphy showed up when we arrived at our overnight stop. (Who invited you along??!!)

 

Every once in a while we just have a challenging set up day. We averted our first issue yesterday by having gotten a little smarter as we have gotten more experienced. You can see in this picture that large tree behind the truck. That was the site they originally put us in. And although it probably would have been fine, we would have been stressing all night about having to turn out of our site into the road around that tree. So I trotted right back in and asked if we could move over one site. Yay! We’ve finally learned to think about things like that before we get into the spot, instead of after!!

We were glad that we arrived early because we just had a lot of other small issues. Nothing we haven’t encountered before – just irritating things that make it not fun to be setting up. The angle in the front of the site meant the jacks couldn’t extend enough to level the rig, so we had to hook back up and put the wood cribbing under the front jacks.

We also had an issue getting the jaws of our hitch to open, which also tends to happen on sites with a slope like this. Harry has learned how to get them to release (eventually) by moving the truck back and forth, but it usually takes a few times, and it’s frustrating until they actually open up. Especially when it’s cold!! 

And we’ve had a new issue to deal with over the past few months. Over the past several years Heartland owners with the Level up system have had to deal with an issue that they lovingly (or not so much) refer to as the Lippert pop. Last summer on the forum they started talking about a “fix” for the pop which involved adding some additive to the hydraulic fluid. We picked it up at a CAT parts store in Vermont last August. Harry added it to the hydraulic fluid and ever since then we’ve had a bit of an issue with our slides and jacks “pausing” a bit when we move them. We believe that it’s because the additive hasn’t fully mixed with the hydraulic fluid, and I don’t think all this cold has helped either. It seems to be affecting our Level Up system a bit as well because when it “pauses” the system times out, or something. It’s hard to describe but we had that issue yesterday too.

We did finally manage to get unhitched, set up and leveled, but we were very happy when we were all done and sitting in our chairs yesterday!!

I am hoping that both today’s travel AND set-up will be uneventful!! Mr. Murphy can just stay right here!!