We woke up this morning at 6:30 to get ready to head out from Kentucky. 

Yesterday we got the bike strapped in the back, put away almost everything, filled up the freshwater tank, put the hose away, drained the gray and black tanks, flushed them and put those hoses away, and strapped everything in the bed of the truck so we didn’t have much to do this morning.
When we got up Allen noticed that there was no hot water to the kitchen or the half bath. Fantastic. So we went ahead and blew out all the lines with our air compressor. We opened the low point drains and got all the water that we could out of it because it would just freeze on the way to Minnesota.

Allen got up on the camper and swept off the roof and swept off the slides. We had to jiggle the antenna to get it to come down because it was frozen in the up position. He had to use his all purpose tool a.k.a. his knife to break the ice around it in order for me to put it down.

Then the fun part started! We tried to put in the bedroom slide (that’s a schwintek electric slide from Lippert). It came in super crooked and it left about 6 inches sticking out once it was all the way retracted. So we tried to sync it how Emily from Lippert taught us to do before but that didn’t work. So I called Lippert. John told me to do the manual override (where you hit a button on the control panel six times and hold it on the seventh). It’s in the front cubby by the generator. So I did that and it brought one side in all the way but the other side was still sticking out about 5 to 6 inches.

Then we realized that we had a dead motor. We thought we had an extra motor lying around somewhere from when we had a problem with it before but we couldn’t find it anywhere that we looked. So currently we are driving down the road with our slide sticking out approximately 3 inches. Cool, huh? 

I did get a hold of Emily once we were on the road. We were going to try and shoot up to Lippert’s factory and have them replace the motor for us, but they close at 4pm today. We probably wouldn’t make it until 5pm. So I’m supposed to call Emily Monday to have her send a motor to us and walk us through how to change it ourselves.

At least it’s not supposed to precipitate before we get to St. Paul so we should be ok.

The hydraulic jacks were super slow coming up (we expected that) and they stutter stopped and started the whole time because it’s so cold. When we finally got everything sucked in and sucked up we tried to hook the truck up to the camper but lo and behold the hitch was frozen! So Allen busted out his little torchy heater gun thingy that runs on propane and warmed all that up. After about 15 minutes messing with the hitch we finally got the camper hooked up to the truck.

So we are aiming to get to the Iowa 80 Truck Stop by tonight to rest and we’re hoping that they sell some sort of fluid to thaw out diesel fuel since we have 40 gallons in the auxiliary tank that we can’t use because the pump is frozen. That place is like Disney for truckers (and us) so I’m thinking if anyone has it, they will. But now we have to stop for fuel before we get there… defeating the purpose of having an auxiliary tank in the first place!

All this and we haven’t even made it to Minnesota yet.

We are trying to get there Saturday so we will have Sunday to possibly make a skirting to go around the outside of the camper. Hopefully that will keep the kitchen island and the half bath from freezing for 2 to 3 weeks. It’s not cheap and we hate to do it for such a short time, but it’s looking like our only option at this point.

Makes you want to go “glamping” in January up north, eh??

Wish us luck. Whoever decided it was a good idea to go work on a tower in St. Paul in January needs their head examined!

*sorry for the lack of photos in this post. My fingers were frozen all morning! But here’s one of Eusy checking out Storm, the friendliest wolf in the world.