If it's not one thing, it's another!

When we got to Lake Whitney Thousand Trails, there were no 50A sites available, so we parked in a 30A site. It was quite warm that day (Friday) and Miss Doozie's engine had warmed up the bedroom quite a bit, but we managed to work the air conditioner in the middle and then the one in the back serially in order to get it cool enough to get by.

Saturday, a cold front moved in, and by Sunday morning, we actually used the furnace. We thought, "Maybe we'll be ok in a 30A site."

Today (Monday), it got warm again. In addition to that, the 30A site we were in had the sewer hookup way Way WAY in the back of the site, and uphill from the bus (yeah, that makes a lot of sense cuz liquids flow uphill so well!) - so far back that we were going to need to back Miss Doozie further into the site for our sewer hose to reach.

We decided, instead of doing that, to drive around and see if there were any 50A sites available now (maybe weekend folks had left). We hopped in the Jeep and.... nothing... it wouldn't start. It wouldn't even try to turn over. Battery issue...

We've had problems a few times that the 12V things that we have in the Jeep stay on even after the ignition is off (normally turning off the ignition and opening the doors turns off power to the 12V receptacle, but not always). We will notice that the Garmin GPS is still on and turn the ignition to on and then off to get the 12V receptacle to lose power. We thought that maybe, when we got back on Saturday evening we didn't notice and the Garmin GPS and dash cam had drained the battery.

Dwayne checked the battery and found a bit of corrosion on the connections, so he cleaned that off. We have a charger in one of the roof storage pods, so I went up and got that. It appeared to be charging, but the battery really was not drawing the amps it should have drawn if it was a dead as it appeared to be. One of the other campground residents had stopped by (just have an engine compartment open and you'll get company in a campground!) and gave as his opinion that the battery had a bad cell.

Since we have a number of batteries on the bus, we decided to see if the one used to start the generator could be swapped into the Jeep. It fit and the Jeep would again start.

In the process of dealing with this, I had called the campground ranger to ask if they could provide a jump start - they couldn't, but we were sure that we could get someone to help us (the fellow who stopped by offered to give us a jump start). But... the battery that had died was an Interstate, and the shop that sells them was closing in 15 minutes, so we weren't getting there today (jump-starting the Jeep would only help if we could drive it to the shop to get the battery replaced right away), thus the decision to swap out with the generator battery.

I also asked the ranger if there was a 50A site available, and there was (so we didn't have to drive around looking for one) - and it was just up the road from us. Once we got the Jeep going (and could move it so it was no longer blocking the bus), we packed up and moved the short distance to a 50A site and we can run 2 (or 3) air conditioners at the same time!

We bought this one in January 2015 (note Dwayne's label telling exactly when it was installed) - so we wanted to find a shop that sells Interstate Batteries in hopes that we can get an allowance on the new one.

The failing battery is in the back of the Jeep, ready to go to Auto Worx in Whitney tomorrow.

The generator battery is doing duty as the Jeep battery for now.

So glad Dwayne knows how to do these things!