How many things could go wrong on one trip?
The short answer is a lot--way more than I ever expected.
I think I had more things go wrong on the trip from Galveston, TX to SC last week than I've had in the previous ten years of RVing.
Here's a list of what went wrong
#1. I had a flat tire about an hour after I left. The tire sensor was leaking. I stopped and removed the sensor, plugged my air compressor into the 120 VAC inverter, and pumped the tire back up. Thankfully, there was nothing wrong with the tire.
#2. The taillight and brake light on the right side of the dolly came off. I drove the rest of the way without it and didn't get a ticket. The problem was that I had replaced the 8" tires and wheels with 10" ones. That's what the dolly manufacturer said that they were now putting on the new dollys. He forgot to tell me that they moved the tail light assembly to the side of the tire where there was more room.
#3. When I stopped at the Cracker Barrel parking lot for Saturday night, I put the front jacks down to make the RV level. Then on Sunday morning, they wouldn't retract. I tried everything I knew to do to fix the problem. Then I gave up and called a mobile RV repair service. They charged $150 for the service call and $200 extra to come out on Sunday morning for a total of $350. The guy was good. He found the problem and fixed it in about an hour. The problem was the switch on the parking brake was stuck. The jacks won't retract if the switch on the parking brake is sending the wrong information.
#4. When I parked the RV at the storage place and was taking the car off of the dolly, I wasn't thinking, and I unlatched the hitch (while I was on my knees unhooking the safety chains and electrical wires). I thought that if I removed the safety pin out of the hitch and released the latch while I was down there, then I wouldn't have to get down on my knees again. Duh--that was a dumb idea.
When I backed the car off of the dolly, the tongue of the hitch went up in the air off of the ball and punched a hole in the back shell of the motorhome. It didn't punch a hole in the back wall of the bedroom-just in the fiberglass shell. It will be easy to fix this summer when I get back to NC.
#5. Since the tongue of the hitch went up in the air, the back of the dolly dropped lower than usual, and some of the plastic parts on the bottom of the car got torn off when I was unloading the car. The purpose of the parts was to make the car more air dynamic for better gas mileage. The car will be easy to fix.
If you look at the picture at the top of this article, you can see the hole in the back of the motorhome (just to the right of the gas cap). And you can also see the missing tail light on the right side of the dolly.
I'll stop bitching,
Bottom line: The things that went bad on my trip from Texas to South Carolina were a combination of making dumb decisions when I was overly tired and some plain bad luck. You cannot do much about bad luck, but hopefully, you can learn from my mistakes about doing things when you're tired.