July 15, 2024. Day 8 of trip. Tim and Heidi’s 23rd wedding anniversary.
For anyone who ever watched the TV Series “Lost” you know that there is a series of numbers in the show that occurs repeatedly: 4-8-15-16-23-42. In the show, the numbers are “cursed” and all sorts of bad things happen related to those numbers. Well, today was the 8th day of our trip, the 15th of the month, and we celebrated our 23rd wedding anniversary, and it sure seemed like the day was cursed. Today was one of the worst days of my life.
Everything started out just fine, and we pulled out of our site at Oceanside Resort near Victoria, British Columbia at 10:45 AM. We headed towards the ferry that would take us from Victoria to Vancouver.
When we arrived at the Swartz Bay Ferry terminal, I pulled up to the ticket window to pay for my reservation. I spoke to the Ferry ticketing agent and explained that I had made a reservation for myself and my wife, and that my wife was following in the car immediately behind me. She asked for my phone number, looked up the reservation and then pronounced, “I’m about ready to ruin your day. You don’t have a reservation for an oversized vehicle, only for 2 small vehicles. You won’t be getting on this ferry.”
Bad event #1 of the day: The ferry terminal worker told me that I couldn’t board the ferry.
I explained that I had made a reservation for 1 oversized vehicle and 1 small vehicle and asked her to look again. After about 5 minutes of hemming and hawing, she looked in a different place on her computer and determined that I did in fact have a valid reservation. She printed me a ticket and told me I could board. Just before I drove away she said, “I printed the wrong ticket” and asked me to stop. She printed a 2nd ticket, handed it to me and told me to board the ferry.
As I drove away, I heard a small noise, but nothing seemed concerning. About 2 seconds later, Heidi (who was sitting in the car immediately behind me) called on my phone. “Tim, you just scraped the slide-topper on the side of the ferry building.” There wasn’t anything I could do about it, so I proceeded to board the ferry with a plan to check it out later.
Bad event # 2 of the day: I scraped the side of my RV against a building.
Our travel trailer has a single slide-out which contains the dinette as well as the theater chairs. Above the slide-out is a “slide-topper” which is a canopy that prevents dirt, leaves, and pine needles from dropping on the slide-out when extended. When the slide-out is retracted, the slide-topper hangs out as the widest object at the top of the RV. If you are going to scrape something on the top of the passenger side of our RV, it will be the slide-topper.
After successfully boarding the ferry, I inspected the slide-topper, and could see that the retractor mechanism was a little bent and there was a linear tear in part of the canvas where it had scraped. I was irritated at myself for doing this, but figured it would be fixable. This didn’t look like any serious damage had been done. It was a tight fit to board the ferry with the truck and trailer, but overall not too bad.
We went to the passenger deck and got together on the designated pet area of the ferry and enjoyed the view as we ate lunch and traveled the 90 minutes to Vancouver.
Our next destination, the Capilano RV Park, sent specific instructions which stated not to take the obvious route (Hwy 99) but instead to take a longer route (Hwy 1) due to Hwy 99 going right through downtown Vancouver. Avoiding downtown Vancouver like a reasonable idea, so we followed their recommendation. As we departed the ferry, we went separate ways: Heidi, and Annalise took the Highlander and drove on Hwy 99 (the direct route) and Dexter and I took Ranger, Red Rover and the trailer down Hwy 1 (the “safer” route).
Heidi and Annalise were on a mission to get cheesecake. We had cheesecake as our wedding cake 23 years ago and we always try to have some cheesecake on our anniversary. They went to Simit Bakery for Basque cheesecake. Our plan was to reunite at the Capilano RV Park once they had successfully gotten some anniversary cheesecake.
Dexter, and I made it about halfway to the RV park before something went wrong. My truck started beeping at me, but I couldn’t immediately identify the source of the beeping. I looked at the dash: no lights were blinking. I looked at the main screen: nothing was amiss. Dexter then reached over and turned off our TMPS monitor and that made the beeping stop.
My truck did not come with a TPMS so I added an aftermarket version that monitors all 10 tires (6 on truck, 4 on trailer) simultaneously. Problem identified: Low tire pressure. I had Dexter turn the TPMS back on and we discovered that the rear passenger trailer tire was losing air at an extremely rapid rate. I needed to get off the road as quickly as possible. I had previously seen videos of RVs losing control due to a tire blow-out and I didn’t want to lose control.
Bad event #3 of the day: sudden loss of tire pressure which caused me to have to leave the highway quickly and unexpectedly.
I managed to depart the highway successfully and saw a spot on the opposite side of the road where it looked like I could stop and assess the situation. I slowed down and attempted to turn around. Unfortunately, there was not enough room to turn around, and my trailer got stuck, perpendicular to the road. I was completely blocking the road. I attempted to back out of the situation, and I heard a crunching sound which I knew was the nose of my trailer rubbing against the back of my truck.
This event happened right next to a fire station, and several of the fireman from Burnaby Station #1 heard the crunch and came out to investigate. One of the firemen guided me into the fire station parking lot where there was sufficient room to turn around and also assess the damage. By the time I stopped, my trailer tire had dropped from 85 PSI to under 40 PSI in less than 1 minute, further evidence of a substantial leak.
When I inspected the impacted tire, I discovered a huge hunk of metal had penetrated my tire. It was an odd bit of steel, about ¼” in diameter, twisted around on itself. I think it might have been a chain-link from a tire chain from a semi-truck but I don’t know with certainty. The air was hissing ominously like an angry feline.
One of the firemen grabbed his fire truck tire repair kit, extracted the metal piece, patched the tire and wished me good luck on my journey. I unearthed my tire inflator, set it to 80 PSI and reinflated the tire.
While the tire was inflating, I assessed the damage to the truck and the trailer. I managed to damage the tail light, the fender flare, the exterior side of the truck bed and scrape a small amount of paint off the canopy. The trailer had some minor damage to the fiberglass, but nothing significant. No structural damage to the truck. The truck was still safe to drive. The fireman who helped me said, “That’s gonna be expensive to fix. Those aluminum truck beds are spendy when they get dinged, you are going to have to replace the entire side of the truck bed.”
Bad event #4 of the day: I rubbed the back of my truck against the nose of my trailer.
Fortunately, we were safe. Fortunately, the TPMS worked as desired and alerted me. If I had driven much further, I’m sure that the tire would have blown out completely and I could easily have broken an axle or even overturned my trailer. I don’t mean to minimize the damage that occurred, but it could have been so much worse.
I called Heidi to explain the situation and she wasn’t exactly thrilled to hear about our misadventure.
After the tire was fully inflated, we made sure that the pressure was stable, and then headed to Capilano River RV park.
We rushed to detach from the truck, get the rig hooked up and change into our dress clothes so Heidi and I could go out to our anniversary dinner. We had a 6PM reservation at a vegetarian restaurant called “The Acorn” which is one of the top vegetarian restaurants in the whole world, and we couldn’t be late. We made it with 2 minutes to spare.
According to their website, The Acorn is, “a Michelin recommended, award-winning, vegetable-forward locavore restaurant that is also zero-waste.” The restaurant seemed very Portland in vibe. We had the chef’s tasting menu and since the restaurant is entirely vegetarian, we could eat everything on the tasting menu! That was amazing to me as I’ve always wanted to go have a chef’s tasting menu somewhere but being a vegetarian, it never seems worth it. All told, it was a 2-hour journey of tasty delights.
We are in the process of selling our house and it is supposed to close in 2 days. The buyer’s inspector stated that our house air conditioning needed servicing and we agreed to get this done prior to sale. Toward the end of dinner, I got a call from our real estate agent notifying us that the HVAC guy had done $1,100 worth of work to service system, but he needed to order a part and it would cost us another $3,400 to get our HVAC system up to par.
I’m so frustrated about this as our HVAC system was working just fine when we listed our house for sale. I think it is mighty suspicious that my air conditioning was working fine, then the inspector fiddled with it, and now it doesn’t work. There is nothing I can do other than to authorize the repair. I do not want to delay closing and I am hundreds of miles away, so I just have to pay.
Bad event #5 of the day: Unexpected $3,400 bill related to selling our house.
To summarize the bad events of today: Ferry worker told me I couldn’t board the ferry. I tore a hole in our slide-topper. I had a metal object cause a flat tire in my trailer. I bumped the rear end of the truck with the nose of the trailer. I received an unexpected $3,400 bill. I definitely win the suffering award of the day.
They say that the only way to get good at anything is to get experience and the only way to gain experience is to make mistakes, I supposed I gained a large amount of experience today.
We returned to our trailer after leaving the kids unattended for just over 3 hours and they managed not to harm each other. They ate tons of junk food, watched an old 007 movie, and when we got home, Annalise was practicing her cello.
We somehow found some extra room in our tummies to enjoy a bit of our cheesecake and it was divine! Happy 23rd anniversary to us!
I am a little bit hesitant to publish this post, mostly because of schadenfreude. There will be plenty of people who find joy in reading about the troubles I faced today. Here I am, only 8 days into my 400-day journey and I’ve already scraped up my truck. There are plenty of people cheering us on as we travel, but a few that are rooting against us. I suppose nobody really wants to read a blog where everything is great all the time. If every blog entry was something about how amazing things are going, people would get bored and move on.
I will not let this setback ruin my trip. I will get the Red Rover fixed. I will overcome this obstacle.
Tomorrow will be a better day. It has to be, right?
SAOTD: Tim who had one of the worst days of his life.