Remember, you signed up for this

When the black tank overflows or the plumbing springs a leak, or a tire blows out, remember, you signed up for this.

You might think, "No, I didn't." But you really did when you decided to live in an RV. A lot of things go wrong when you're RVing. If you wanted everything to go smoothly, you should have stayed in your sticks and brick house.

Every time something bad happens, just remember that if there were no problems, there would be no adventure. And adventure is what you signed up for.

You wanted to experience something other than routine. You've had it with routine. You wanted excitement and adventure.

RVs don't play fair

RVing is a constant challenge. It's almost like a game. It's you against the RV. And the RV doesn't always play fair. In fact, it almost never plays fair. One good thing about RV problems is that most of the time, the problem doesn't involve the engine or transmission and is not expensive to fix.

Of course, at $150/hour or more, even little problems can get expensive if you can't fix them yourself. I paid over $400 one time to have a radiator hose clamp replaced.

Here's an example

I had been battling a roof leak for months. What makes it difficult to find and fix a roof leak is that the hole in the roof is almost never right above where the water is coming into the RV. In fact, it could be (and usually is) on the other side of the RV.

I had caulked everywhere I thought water could possibly be getting in, and it didn't help a bit. I decided to watch some YouTube videos about roof leaks.

I watched one video explaining how a leak could be caused by a bad air conditioner mounting gasket. I bought two gaskets. I decided I might as well replace the gaskets on both air conditioners while I was into it.

The process involves removing the nuts on the four mounting bolts on the corners of the air conditioner, disconnecting the cables, lifting the air conditioner, and replacing the gasket. That looked simple enough. When I got to the bolts to remove the nuts, I found that the nuts were so loose I could turn them with my fingers.

Rather than continuing with the process of removing the air conditioners and replacing the gaskets, I decided to tighten the nuts which hold the air conditioner tight against the gasket and see if that fixed the problem. Lo and behold, it did. I haven't had a leak in over a month, and there have been some pretty hard rains here during that time.

Perseverance and luck

Perseverance (and a little luck) is all that it took to fix the problem. When you're living in an RV, you have to go with the flow, fix problems from time to time, and not get bent out of shape. Just remember that when you have problems, that's part of what you signed up for.

Bottom line: Loose nuts can cause a lot of problems. To make things worse, I think sometimes I'm the loose nut.