Tuesday May 1, 2012-Moving day-Poche's Fish N Camp to Oasis RV Resort, LaMarque TX

We got up pretty early this morning, around 7AM, to hit the road again  today. I got most of the outside stuff stowed away and was ready to go except for the electric cord. I decided to raise the rear hydraulic jacks and when almost finished, I noticed the door side slide moving in. Great! I thought. Stella has started to slide the rooms in so it won't be long until we are on our way. Wrong! She came out the door screaming at me to stop! She wasn't ready for the room to come in, so obviously our problems with the hydraulic system have escalated. The jacks were all the way up, so when she was ready, she rolled the rooms in. She said that she had to hold the button on the two hydraulic-powered rooms to get them in, but they came in just the same. I had a similar problem with the landing gear and had to hold the switch in to get them up. When it seemed like we were ready to go, I noticed that the system was still working, even though the controller was off. It would flash on and the pump would engage, so I didn't want to start out down the road and have one of the rooms slide out or the jacks to deploy.I tried everything, trying to turn the controller back on, etc. but couldn't get anything to shut it down completely.

I sent a text message to Jim B and he agreed to contact Bob Tiedge, creator of the Level Up system. In just a few minutes, my phone rang with Bob on the line. Man, that's service! Bob walked me through disconnecting the ground wire to the pump, which stopped the "cycling" of the system. Now we were ready to roll!

I forgot about telling you about Bill's solution to the stabilizer problem. Neither of us thought that it would fit in the underbelly, but we went down and picked it up and brought it back, and after some moving things around in the storage compartment, it went in! Thank goodness, that just saved me a 500 mile drive to pick this thing up. I repacked everything and this part is done! Now back to the actual trip.

We made good time through Louisiana and crossed the Texas border around noon. Of course road construction slowed us down as soon as we crossed, but thats okay, we're back in Texas! We made our only stop at the Texas welcome center. After a quick walk to the restrooms, we were again on our way. I noticed that Texas did not offer free coffee to guests, as Mississippe and Alabama both do at theirs. Just an observation. I don't want taxes to go up because of free coffee.

We made it to the Ron Hoover Oasis Resort about 3:30 and were glad to be here for about three weeks. I think I overwhelmed the girl that wrote up our repair order but she wrote down every word that I said to her. A tech-Ryan- was soon at our site to help with getting the hydraulics to work. I called Bob back and he walked Ryan through getting things back in order. Now the entire system is down and Ryan finally got the front landing gear to come down by using the slide controls! He got the off-door slide out but had to manually roll the doorside slide out. He didn't try to get the rear jacks down today and promised to come back tomorrow to work on it some more.

We had promised Tyler that we would come over to take him to supper, but we were tired from two hard days of travel, topped off by the leveler problems, so we called and told him that we will put it off until tomorrow. We were glad to be here and able to relax. Now to get the repairs made.

So long.