Today’s best practice tips are:

• Stow the extendable table before retracting the slides
• Stop and investigate when you hear a thump while retracting slides

This happened Monday morning while packing up to leave for the next site. We left 3.5 hours late due to repairing the damage. Nothing additional appears to have been damaged.

It looks like our trailer should be rocking in the waves. The seas are too rough.

And here is our island up on blocks like a ’57 Chevy. I tried to swap out the short block engine for a long block engine, but I could not find the engine compartment in our island.

Here is the support frame that has been unscrewed from the island and the floor. We had to reposition it to be close to the original place, but not in the place where the screw holes pulled loose.

Here the stand is getting screwed back into the floor. We could only lift the island about two inches before it hit a bend in the drain pipe. Unfortunately, the electric screw driver did not fit in the space available. I had to use a ratcheting hand screw driver for many of the screws. Even worse, the ratcheting screw driver did not fit in one end of the island, so I had to use a ratchet with a 1/4″ bit with a screwdriver bit stuck into it. That was fun.

Here the stand is secured into the floor, and the island is being positioned back onto the stand. In the end, the stand and island are slightly skewed. The slides come in with a little room to spare and the island appears secure. I am not sure we won, but I do not think we lost either. Let’s call it a tie.

Now that we are through with the drama, humor, and pictures, here are a few details. We had just gotten the roof replaced by insurance because a large limb falling on the roof had cracked the roof decking earlier in the year. The people replacing the roof dropped a few screws. We found two of them on the awning before leaving. After we got back to Fort McCoy, I found another on the rubber slide seal. We were worried that screws might be caught in the slide seals, so we brought the slides in slowly and checked the top of the slide inside the RV. In the process of doing this, we failed to follow our normal safety precautions.

Kate said, “What’s that?” I was laughing because the office door popped open again, so I said, “The office door popped open.” Kate brought the slide in more and we heard a loud thump/pop. Checking outside, the slide was canted out at the top. When Kate brought the slide back out, our island was shipwrecked. It took about 3.5 hours to repair, but we managed to just barely make it to our next site with enough daylight to setup.