Waiting for Maintenance

Imagine, if you can, that you have to drive your house to the house repair shop and drop it off for, say, an oil change on your furnace. That's a bit like what we were doing this week. We dropped our house off at Camping World in Fort Myers, to have the roof cleaned and resealed. And have our electric step fixed.

When we drop off the house, we leave the cat in it. The repair people are generally used to this, so it's not a problem. It has been warm here this week, though, and while Camping world was cleaning the roof, they needed to keep the windows closed, so Moonie was pretty sweaty when we got back (but she declined a good shower!).

We stayed in the back parking lot at Camping World on the night before and the night after the work there. There were lots of other RVs there, most of them empty. They have no hookups, so we were on our own. I discovered a problem with our house batteries, one that had been patched last summer, but needs real fixing now. The terminals on two of our 4 6 volt golf cart batteries had corroded, and the wire had corroded off one of them. I grabbed our jumper cables and made a temporary repair.

While they were working on our roof, we went out and enjoyed our traffic accident, as I reported in yesterday's blog. Then we went to the dog beach.

Engine Repairs

On the following day, we took the house over to to Cummins Power South for oil changes on the engine and the generator. I had said we'd be there around 7:30, but we didn't make it until 8:30 and they couldn't start on it until the second round of repairs that day. Our hoped for departure of noon ended up being pushed back to 5:00, but we bad.

We decided to look around Fort Myers. I had heard that there was a museum that encompassed the winter homes and lab of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, good friends and camping buddies. We found the place, but didn't want to drop $40 to see them. We did see some of the grounds and Edison's massive 100 year old Banyan tree.

We then left to see what else was around, and embarrassed ourselves by arriving at the toll booth for the bridge from Fort Myers to Cape Coral without even the $1.00 needed to cross the bridge. The toll taker, whose name was Debbie, paid our toll for us, and we found an ATM and returned her cash on the way back.

We drove around Cape Coral for a while, looking to see what was there. Cape Coral is an interesting city, in that they seem to have tried to get every house on a canal with access to the gulf. In the middle of the city, you'll see 40' sailboat masts in people's back yards. But you can't easily get around town by car, as the canals cause many, many dead end streets.

We stopped at Dunkin' Donuts for coffee and bagels. We stopped at a fan store and bought a couple of plastic 110 volt fans to put over our windshield, partly as defroster, partly to cool us as we drive. We drove out to Rotary Park, and looked at the tall condos. We then looked for a place to have lunch, and found a wonderful Cuban restaurant called Mambos.

We then landed at Four Freedoms Park, a city park which was at the end of what you might call a canal cul de sac. The picture at the top of this blog chapter is from the park, and the one at the left is a panorama of the view. It was a wonderfully pleasant day, and we spent about two hours there.

On the way back, we stopped at Target and a cooking shop to get a few essentials. We finally got back to our house at the repair shop around 3:30, waited until 5:00 to get on the road. We spent some of that time on the phone with the insurance company, going over the details of the accident again. We answered questions on our repairs, like: Do you want to install new $200 air cleaner? (Yes).