REPOST: The RV Story
Vacation Repost -- the first crisis I experienced with Bertha, back in October:
Lots of people I run into ask me whether I've seen the movie RV. Yes, my best friend made me go see it right before I went and picked Bertha up, then I rented it again to show my parents. Aside from the small dumping fiasco a week or two ago, I haven't had anything noteworthy to report in that vein. However, Tuesday night when I arrived in Moorpark I almost wished for a film crew.
The problem, as I see it, is Bertha's enormous length. Added to her length is a couple feet of a sort of arrangement that holds the scooter and plugs into the hitch. Driving up into their driveway I scraped for just a second, but went on not thinking too much about it. The next step was to drive up a rather steep hill to get into the riding arena, where I planned on parking for the week. Sadly, neither I nor the gal standing outside directing me heard the screeching and scraping until it was too late. At that point I was stuck, stuck and more stuck.
We tried standing on the front bumper. We tried putting boards behind the tires -- still they would spin uselessly. The gal had a jack in her truck that we thought we'd try (As an aside, what I thought was a jack in one of my compartments turned out to be reflector lights. Good to know.). So we tried the jack and, no matter how hard we worked at it, couldn't make the stupid circle thing turn more than one rotation. At this point one of the roommates came home and, tho I hate to add to the notion of the weaker sex, he was able to make the jack turn and move the rear up a little. Unfortunately it was not a big enough jack for Bertha's considerable heft, so it started to tweak.
The roommate, we'll call him MacGyver, then proceeded to try everything we'd already tried. No luck. Finally we sent the gal to her house to pick up her nephew's floor jack. I was prepared to make my inaugural Good Sam call if this didn't work. Luckily I was not made the butt of another joke around the Good Sam repair office because MacGyver was able to make the jack work, lift the end enough to take off the hitch contraption, and then muscle Bertha into reverse. Success!
Suffice it to say, I'm parked in the level part of the driveway and quite content there.
