Finale? NOT! The Saga Continues…

Our day of departure from South Padre Island arrived with much trepidation. After all our issues after the winter storm, would everything work? What if it didn’t? Checkout was at 11 am so I got up early to prepare to go.

I packed the outdoor rugs and chairs, stowed all the power, water and sewer stuff. Sharon did her usual routine to ready the car for towing. I checked everything outside and then after going inside to pull the slides in … nothing. Slides won’t move… sigh.

Hurriedly I checked  fuses, breakers etc. and assume I have a relay problem. With no time to spare I called a mobile tech who came out to at least jump the relays to make them all come in. I fired up the engine and then the jacks won’t come up.  Really!!! Then I noticed the low power light and see the batteries weren’t ready. When the light went out the jacks came up so at least we could leave and I would figure out the slides later… oh, well.

As we start driving the RV out of the park, the first thing I notice is that the speedometer isn’t working. WTF!!! Really? Well at least I notice the engine is running fine other than it had a rough idle before we left. We continued on. Just outside of of Port Isabel we came upon a stretch of road where I was able to pick up speed.

Watching my RPM’s I knew we were going about 60 mph. I switched on the cruise control and guess what? Yep, you guessed it… it didn’t work! At least we only had 50 miles to go to our next park since I wanted to stay in the valley to be close to the Freightliner shop who worked on our rig. Now I was sure glad we chose to do that.

Before we finally got to the next park we also discovered the exhaust brake wasn’t working either. As we made our way to our assigned site at the RV park, we discover the site was nearly impossible to get into, but, we did. I jumped the slide relays to pull the slides out and had the jacks go down smoothly, so now it was time to call Freightliner back.

I called service who informed me that it would cost more to send the tech back out until I sternly reminded them their last job wasn’t done yet and simply needed to be finished. They agreed to send out a tech the next day.

Tuesday morning we saw our friendly tech, who we now are on first name basis with, especially after Sharon gave him some of her homemade apple crumble last time he worked on our RV. Anyhow he spent about three hours checking each and every ECM setting that I had Freightliner send them to doublecheck each setting in my newly installed ECM to ensure they were correct.

After uploading the new program settings to our ECM we were pleased to hear the idle was perfect with the new settings. Now we were hopeful that upon taking it out for a spin all the other issues would be resolved as well.  Unfortunately it did not happen. After several hours of more troubleshooting the recommendation was to bring it to the shop in the morning…

So here we are…

NOTE:  We are currently in Pharr, Texas at the Tip O Texas RV Park, next up Rockport Texas…