Home, with a healthy dose of luck and fortune
We left Navarre Beach yesterday morning, no problems, lovely traveling weather. We decided to take the offer the salesman from NIRVC made and pulled in there in the afternoon for a complimentary overnight stay. We took the opportunity to peek into another few RVs before grabbing some dinner, doing some laps around the parking lot for our daily exercise, and hitting the sack for an early start.
That gets us to this morning where we got up bright and early to get on the road and get some miles behind us. Little did I know I was on the path to nightmareville.
Long story moderately short: one of our slides wouldn’t come in. Honestly, that’s the one thing that I really feared which might seem a weird thing to fear. But really, there are very few house-related things that can strand you. There are plenty of chassis-related things that make travel impossible, but they’re all out of my hands anyway. But house-related? Not really. Except the slides, and particularly if the slides get stuck out (I mean, if they’re stuck in you just… have a slide stuck in). With the slide stuck out I wasn’t going anywhere.
Murphy’s Law factored very highly this morning. I went out to start troubleshooting. It was raining, of course. That’s the first Murphy pop up. I checked all the obvious things first. Nothing. Then I started getting more in-depth.
I had one motor that was indicating a wiring error. I looked online and watched videos which gave me a strategy to disengage the motor so I could at least get the slide in and get home. I started unscrewing things to try to get access. Note that this occasioned standing at the top of my folding ladder reaching roughly 11 feet up, removing screw after screw… in the rain. Got the decorative fascia off, still no joy. Removed more and more screws and still couldn’t get access to the motor. That’s annoying. I finally lost my nerve — honestly, because it wasn’t looking anything like what I’d been led to expect — and went to discuss possibilities with the girls inside.
Decided I’d have to ask the service folks at the dealership for assistance. Murphy #2: if you’re going to have this kind of failure, what better place than at a dealership? It’s kind of amazing, really, as last night I was kind of regretting the decision to stay at the dealership. We had electricity at our site, but not water or sewer. We were able to grab some water to fill the fresh water tank, but not quite the same. We also couldn’t leave Subie hooked up so we could just take off in the morning. Minor, but still. But, thinking about dealing with that failure at the RV park, we got supremely lucky to be where we were.
I’d been troubleshooting for several hours, so by then they were open. I walked in and saw my salesman, Dave.
“I was expecting you to be long gone by now,” he remarked.
I held my hands out kind of helplessly. “That’s where Muprhy’s Law comes in… I’ve got a dead slide.”
I’ll snip this one way down. He grabbed the service manager and explained the situation. Roughly 2 minutes later one of their valets was pulling Qubie into one of their service bays — yes, just drove through the parking lot with my bed slide out, with no fewer than two people waving us down while we drove trying to warn us of our idiocy — and the service manager and a tech were troubleshooting. They did the same things I’d done, started removing the same screws I’d very recently replaced (which, honestly, felt pretty good that I was on the right path in my troubleshooting).
While they were inside trying to pull off the inner fascia, I climbed up on the (much taller) ladder and tried to feel around to see if I could find the issue. And I did, actually. The wiring harness into the motor had come completely unconnected. The only difficulty was getting access to the other side of the wiring harness to reattach, but they managed that and thankfully the slide retracted. They put things back together (mostly… they’d unscrewed the slide controller in my bay to get access and forgot to reattach it that I’ll have to reattach… no biggie), shook my hand, and told me to have a nice day. No charge. I know they’re mostly angling for a future customer, but I can’t complain.
So, we got on the road about three and a half hours late, but made it home safe regardless. Major thanks to the folks at NIRVC for both their hospitality and their assistance in getting us on the road.
Shallow Roots 
Not getting the slide back in is never a good scenario. You are lucky it happened where it did, at a servicing dealer.
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