Sometimes, things are not what they seem to be

Here's a feathered friend we met in Mountain Home, ID. He is a burrowing owl, who has become quite the celeb at the Mountain Home RV Park, where we are staying tonight. This fellow moved into an abandoned badger burrow a couple of days ago, according to the park host. Unfortunately, my little Sony digital camera doesn't have enough zoom to get a really close picture, so I had to crop a distant shot and blow it up.

Mountain Home is about 5o miles east of Boise. It has a population of about 11,000, and is host to an Air Force base. Our original destination for today was Twin Falls, ID. The story of how we ended up in Mountain Home is a little embarrassing.

Last evening, after a lovely day exploring La Grande and Union, OR, we settled in for an evening of relaxation. At bedtime, Jill discovered that the lights in the bedroom wouldn't come on. Then she discovered that the bedroom TV didn't work. I checked all the fuses and breakers, and nothing seemed to explain the problem.

Later I checked the monitoring panel, which tells the status of all the batteries and holding tanks. It was dead. Then, this morning, we discovered that the refrigerator was not working. I pored over wiring diagrams; checked the fuses and breakers again; and removed the bedroom TV from its enclosure to check the ground wire, because the previous owner had had a new ground wire installed. Nothing seemed to explain the problem. We looked up a couple of RV repair places in Boise and decided we would stop there.

As a result of all of this fun, we got a late start from La Grande. At the Weatherby rest stop, we opened the door on the curb side of the coach, and I realized we had been traveling with the electric step extended. After I got finished feeling embarrassed about the step being out, I flipped the switch to make it retract, but nothing happened. Was this yet another electrical failure?

The interesting thing is that it took this situation with the door to bring me to my senses, because I have had this problem before. Almost without thinking, I checked the house power main cut off switch. Bingo! It was turned to the off position. I switched it on, and suddenly, we had lights in the bedroom, TV in the bedroom, refrigerator, and monitoring panel...and the step retracted on command.

The next thing I thought of was how I would have felt, if I had taken Sadie to an RV repair facility, only to be told, "You have to turn the switch ON for it to work." Or worse, what if they had spent two days working on the coach at $80 per hour before they found the switch turned off and then presented me with the bill?

Jill and I were elated to learn that our beloved Sadie was feeling better again. The rest of the trip was a pleasure, but we were behind schedule, so we decided to stop in Mountain Home and continue tomorrow...or the next day. We love this place! Check out our "camp."