We Found Some Problems!

A lot has happened over the course of the last month. Many of those things can be categorized as "we moved," though others are moderately interesting. Fitting a 3 bedroom house into the upstairs of a garage-attic is certainly one of those things that may fall into both categories, but the fact of the matter is that we've been busy.

Around the 30th of March we were out of our house and shacked up with my parents until we hit the road. In a delightful twist of fate, the weather over the last 10 days has been obscenely wonderful, so it's been a really nice time to kind of get ourselves in order. However, it turns out we were a lot more out of order than we anticipated. 

See, my dad is a handy guy - he knows how to fix things. He also knows how to find things that need fixing and what sorts of things we (we who are...less experienced with cars, and that's about the most generous way I can describe us in comparison to my dad's handiness) wouldn't think of. So it was really nice to have him around to throw some extra tools our way and come up with ways we might be able to circumvent a problem.

Our water pump stopped working.

On the one hand, we weren't planning on using it for drinking - we have a 5-gallon water jug plus another gallon or two of more typical water bottles. On the other hand, we didn't want to have to use our drinking water to wash our dishes or wash our hands at the end of a day on the trails. So what do we do?

We ask dad. 

One of the difficulties with a campervan is that in order to make everything fit in the van, you have to...make everything fit in the van. It's tight in the utility-area. There's a water pump, two marine batteries, a voltage converter (or is it an inverter? Who knows), a furnace, and a jack within about 5 square feet. So when you need to take one thing out, you need to take a bunch of things out.

In any case, after an hour or two, dad figured out that there was a faulty grounding-wire in the pump so it wasn't getting consistent power. We went to a store, got some wiring, got some odds and ends, and came home to fix it. Everything worked great.

Until we put it back in place, at which point it stopped working again.

Turns out there was still just a loose connection and it really wasn't that big a deal to fix from there, but it was a pretty aggravating half-hour. The upshot is that for several hours we thought our sink was going to be decorative. Then two days later the sink was leaking anyway.

That's right, Jenna discovered a leak under the sink. Remember how I said things are really packed into a small space in the back with the furnace and whatnot? It's arguable even worse under the sink. And after hours of tightening everything I could possibly tighten and realizing there were tons of tools that wouldn't fit into such a confined space, I ultimately had to just try Flex Seal spray. And I'm not sure if you know this, but Flex Seal on your hands is a real bummer.

In the midst of all of this, we were packing the van, organizing the garage, and trying to figure out how to keep our bedroom from reflecting the mess that was reflected...everywhere else.

We had planned to leave today, Friday, but after the stress of not getting everything done yesterday (due to the sink leak, which is...maybe fixed? Hard to say just yet), we decided to put it off til Saturday.

Why is that important? Because it took until today, Friday, for any of us to realize that MAYBE we needed to get new license plates on the van. That's right, we had talked about tags and plates before, but apparently neither of us realized that it was something we actually had to take care of before driving away for a month. Not our proudest moment, but it was brought to our attention at like 2:00, which gave us 3 hours to get it done, and we did just that. 

We also learned that the thing we were told was a gray-water release valve is actually NOT a gray-water release valve and is instead the fresh-water tank release. That is, if you wanted to empty the water tank in order to winterize the van (or whatever - I don't know what any of this means), you could empty that tank with this valve. The thing on the driver's side of the van that says "drain outlet" is the actual gray-water release valve, though we were told that was incorrect. It's not incorrect. The sign is right.

Let's recap. This week we:

• Found a leak under the sink and maybe fixed it
• Had a faulty water pump and replaced wiring in order to make sure the water pump (mostly) works
• Used flex seal for the first time
• Packed a ton of stuff into a campervan and have a shocking amount of room to spare
• Slept in the van for a trial run. I slept well, Jenna didn't
• Got new license plates
• Learned that we can just use the fresh-water tank release to wash our dishes if we want to
• Did a trial run of changing a tire - turns out breaking the hubcap is the real part I'm concerned about
• Delayed departure by one day

So...we're leaving tomorrow.