We were supposed to leave last Friday evening, but our RV was delayed in the shop, which compressed all the preparation tasks I usually do. On Thursday night, when I began sanitizing the water system, I discovered that the water tanks had not been fixed correctly by the RV place. Water was pouring out of the bottom of my sealed RV, creating quite a messy situation. In an emergency, I had to purge and drain a couple of hundred gallons of bleach water onto my yard.
Frustrated, I sent a scathing email and LinkedIn message, and surprisingly, they called me on Friday morning, asking me to bring the RV back. They patched it up, but this setback put me even further behind schedule.
We finally got the RV back on Friday night and started rushing to put everything together. This continued into Saturday afternoon. We ended up leaving around 3 PM on Saturday, which wasn't a huge deal since our check-in wasn't until Monday afternoon.
After about two hours on the road, we had a blowout on the trailer, but I quickly changed the tire like an Indy pit crew member in under 15 minutes, and we continued on. However, an hour later, we experienced another blowout, and that's when things started to go downhill.
We managed to pull off into the parking lot of a hotel in Ozona, Texas, at around 9 PM. I called my reliable roadside assistance, and they found a service that came out, brought a tire, and changed it for us. The owner of the service truck was kind enough to open his shop at 11 PM and replaced all six tires and our spare.
Around midnight, we were back on the road with new tires, but the RV had suffered some damage from the blowout. We reached Walmart in Ft Stockton around 2 AM and decided to get some rest.
That marked the end of day 1. The next morning, we headed to Roswell via the Permian Basin, where the scorching heat made it feel like the gates of hell. By noon, it was about 120 degrees Fahrenheit, so we had to take it slow and ended up making a 4-hour drive in about 6 hours.
When we arrived at the RV park in Roswell, we realized it was too small for our RV and tricky to navigate. Around that time, Jaclynn started feeling unwell, and we had to make an emergency trip to the ER, with the challenge of maneuvering the almost 50-ft trailer. We illegally parked in a Mexican restaurant parking lot and walked her over to the hospital, grateful that our RV had a generator to keep our pets cool.
The hospital staff was amazing and allowed us to bring the RV into their back lot, where we camped out for the next 30 hours while they treated my wife for dehydration.
That marked the end of days 2 and 3.
At that point, we decided to cancel the trip and return home.
After ensuring my wife's fluids were replenished at the hospital, we embarked on the 11-hour drive back home.
And that concludes day 4, when we finally arrived back home.