Category: RV

I’ve been thinking about selling my truck for the past year. Shelley and I had gotten tired of spending days on the road, even though we loved being different places. All the time getting there stopped being any fun. I’ve been holding off doing anything permanent, thinking there’s a chance I could change my mind. But now that I’m flying solo, there is very little chance that I’ll want to take the rig back onto the road.

We loved living in the RV, and that has been my plan up until recently. A few weeks ago the Ping Pong bug hit me, and I started investigating whether I could buy a table tennis table and fit it into my driveway. Turns out that I could. I also started checking to see if there were places nearby to go play ping pong, and I found a table tennis club just a few miles from here at Sun City.

Well, I checked into it, and in order to participate in activities like that at Sun City you have to be a resident. So I looked at what other activities they have going on there and holy moly, it’s a veritable Disneyland for seniors over there!

So I made arrangements to take a tour, and about 10 minutes into the tour I was completely sold. Three golf courses, pickleball and tennis courts everywhere, ceramics, stained glass, and wood shops, etc. Wow!

So I’ve sold the truck and I am house hunting. I’ll need to purchase something on the small side, and of course coming from an RV I have absolutely no furniture. But I’m very excited about this. I do have an air mattress we used for overnight guests, and some nice patio furniture, so I should be good to go for a while.

So this will be a transition from “Where in the world are Ron & Shelley today” to “What in the world activity is Ron doing today”!

Woohoo!

ps. I’ll add more pictures to this post once I’ve found a house.

Luckily we had planned on traveling to Dallas a week early for Shelley’s Proton Therapy. Since we’d booked a nice RV spot on the lake at Hidden Cove RV Resort in Frisco, we decided to go early on Saturday 7/8 and spend a week enjoying the park before Shelley started her treatments on 7/19. Shelley followed me in her car so we would have it for driving back and forth to her treatments daily instead of driving the behemoth truck in Dallas traffic.

About an hour out of Austin she phoned me to tell me that there was smoke coming out from under the RV. I immediately pulled over, and saw that something was wrong with the way the triple axle wheels were aligned. So we let things cool down a bit, then limped along slowly until we reached a Love’s truck stop a short ways up I35. We pulled in and talked with the truck repair shop in the back, but they told us that they didn’t work on RVs so we’d need to call a mobile RV trailer repair service. So that night checked into a cheap motel next door while we looked up and called a mobile repair service and parked the RV on the street in front of it. We contacted a 24/7 mobile repair service, and the guy said he’d be out first thing in the morning.

The next morning we moved the RV from the street to the Love’s parking lot. There was a lot of truck parking in the rear, and we were able to back the rig into the space furthest back. We checked with the Love’s store and they were ok with us parking in the back so long as we weren’t block traffic.

The repair guy didn’t show up until after noon the next day. He pulled the wheels, and determined that we must have hit a curb which bent the axle hangers of the rear 2 axles. Huh? I hadn’t felt a thing. Anyways, he told us that he would get some welding tools and parts and come back out first thing the next morning and repair the hangers.

So we stayed in the RV that night which didn’t work out very well. It was very hot, so we needed to run the generator and A/C around the clock. That meant that I also had to refill the generator fuel tank regularly using a 5 gallon container which required multiple runs up to the gas pumps.

So Monday the repair guy didn’t show up until the afternoon, and spent the rest of the afternoon banging on the hangers and cutting and welding things. We checked into the motel right behind Love’s which worked out pretty well. Well the work went on through the next two days, each day the guy not showing up until afternoon some time, with no real end in sight.

Finally on Wednesday I contacted another mobile RV mechanic, and he came out and took a look at the work that the first was doing. He was very polite, but tactfully stated that he didn’t think the first guy was doing things correctly. If I wanted, he knew a good welder that he could get to help him do the work, but that I would need to contact the trailer manufacturer to order some needed parts. I’m thinking to myself, why hasn’t the first guy contacted them for parts? So I called the the RV tech support, and they referred me to Lippert, trailer manufacturer. The Lippert parts folks were able to explain to me, and send me parts diagrams showing how the parts were supposed to be assembled. I was certain then that the first guy was actually making things worse. So I fired him, ordered the parts, and got Nelson’s Roadside 24/7 mechanic back on the job. They had me order the parts and have them delivered directly to them, and they would come out and do the work as soon as the parts arrived.

The parts arrived on Friday morning, and by early Friday afternoon we were back on the road and checked into Hidden Cove RV park in Frisco.

We had planned on spending the entire summer at Wildwood RV and Golf Resort in Windsor, Ontario to escape the Texas heat, but we had to cancel those plans when Shelley’s health situation changed. A couple lymph notes had become active, and her doctors recommended 6 weeks of proton therapy in Irving near Dallas.

One of the lymph nodes sits right in front of a bundle of nerves in her throat, so other cancer treatment options such as surgery or more common types of radiation would be risky. But proton therapy is very good at exactly this type of situation. It is able to irradiate the lymph node at a specific depth (called the Bragg peak) without causing much damage behind it .

So we spent part of July through the beginning of September in the Dallas area. Shelley was able to find a nice RV park right on a lake in nearby Frisco for the 2 months we’d need to be there. She booked us a campsite with a lot of shade.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get a good internet connection. Since I was working remotely, that was a big problem. We have a Starlink system as backup for when this happens, but there was no way to position the antenna with the necessary view of the sky. So we had to switch sites to one with no afternoon shade.

Temperatures got over 110° while we were there, and the RV got very hot. We learned that RV air conditioners are designed to cool air only 16° to 20°, so my office got up to the mid 90’s in the afternoons.

As you can see in this picture, we tried shading the RV the a ShadeRV on the roof, and shade cloth covering the sunny side, but I don’t know how much good that did. We were still very hot in the afternoons.

So the lesson we learned is that we absolutely must have an RV spot with afternoon shade if we are going to spend the summer in Texas.