Flexibility–Moved Back to Joliet

(Joliet, IL) Hi 79  Lo 61 -- This was one of those days you don't want to talk about when you discuss the fulltime lifestyle with wannabe's and newbies. The day started out good. We got up at 8:30, but no hurry this morning as it wasn’t that long of a trip, only 145 miles back to Joliet, Il to the Hollywood Casino. Jim went to see Jordan, the Carriage service scheduler, to pay our bill. Everything we had done was covered by the warranty except for one item, the panel that covers our tank flush handles. He said it was determine that it was damaged by the accident we had almost two years ago. Yeah, right. Anyway Jim talked him into charging us only for the part, so we saved the charge for a half hour of labor. But when he got back, he said hurry and get things put away, they’re coming to pick up the RV to replace the side trim around the front where we've had problems with loose screws. An hour later they came and towed our home away (again). It was to take about an hour so we went to Rise and Roll Bakery for an early lunch and some donuts.

As we were heading back to Millersburg Jordan called to say our rig was ready to go. They did a great job on the trim. We were out of sequence on our hook up routine, and we soon saw the benefit of having both of us do a walk-around before we leave. I noticed the panel to the Big Foot levelers was closed, which usually means Jim is finished with the hook up and ready to go. But on my walk-around I discovered the front jacks were still down. Not good! He unlocked the panel and brought them up. Good thing we check each other. We got on the road at 11:20.

The trip was smooth and the weather was perfect. We got to the casino in less than three hours. We're back on central time now, which we both love. The RV park office was closed, so we picked a site and got backed in. But something told Jim not to un-hitch until we check in at the hotel registration desk. Good thing we did. They have a large group arriving tomorrow so they wanted us to move to another site. So we moved to the correct site, went through our set-up routine, then noticed the power didn't come on in the rig. Jim tested the power at the pedestal with his volt meter and it was dead. We called the hotel desk and they quickly sent out a maintenance guy. He went to the main breaker panel that has the circuits for about a dozen sites and saw that the breaker for site 25 (ours) was off. He turned it on and there was a pop. Not good! So he told us to move to the next site over (#24). So we re-hitched, moved and set up again. We turned on the a/c to cool down the inside, and after about a minute the power went out. So Jim checked the power at the pedestal again and when he touched the metal cover he got a shock. Not a bad one, but enough to get his attention! He called the office and the guy came back out again. He said it looks like there's a bad ground, probably in the main panel. The head electrician is going to come out early tomorrow to fix things, and we were given the choice of boondocking for the night, or moving again. By this time we were getting pretty worn out, so we decided to stay put and operate on generator power tonight. The maintenance guy was pretty confident that they'll get the problem fixed because they have a lot riding on it with that large group coming in.
 
So when you hear that you have to be flexible in this lifestyle, this is a good example. This is actually going to have a benefit for us. We've always wanted to know how long we can run the generator on a tank of propane, so this will be a good opportunity to find out. Jim is going to check the tanks once an hour to see when the automatic changeover happens. (A red indicator shows up when the first tank empties and the second one takes over.) It's really nice out so we'll leave the a/c off and just run the TV and our laptops, which should help the propane last longer. I may not be on chat tonight, that would be the first time in a very long time. We’ll see what happens. It's times like this that we're really glad we ordered the built-in generator when we bought our home!

We went over to the casino and had dinner in the sports bar. I had a chicken quesidilla and Jim had a steak salad. Both were yummy!