Day eight
Do you ever remember camping in tents when your young. Occasionally you would wake up in the night freezing, you do your best to hunker down into the blankets trying to ignore it, but sleep becomes fleeting as the chill just won’t let off?
I had the same memory happen this morning, I was doing my best to stay warm, thinking it must be really cold out as I can not shake this chill coming off the window. I made an attempt to move away from the window and face the other way only to have my subconscious realize that this was not an improvement to the situation, this is the moment my conscious pulled itself from this restless slumber and I sat up to investigate.
The entire RV was freezing inside, in a moment of concern I jumped out of bed and headed to the front of the RV to check on the heater, it was dead. In a complete feeling of defeat I looked around the RV and noticed everything was dead, the fridge, thermostat controls, and the display for the control board of the RV was blank. I pulled our dogs from their beds and sent them back to our bed where they could curl up under the sheets, they were both shivering when they crawled in.
When I had the dogs finally settled, I began to think of options. Even though I was plugged into 120v outlet, it must have faulted over night. I began to worry about the water lines freezing and knew I needed to heat the place up fast. I tried turning on the generator and nothing happened. I decided to see if I could turn the RV engine over and nothing happened again. In my last ditch effort, I remembered I had a battery assist button that uses the house batteries along with the starter battery to turn the engine over, I tried this and between all the batteries there was just enough juice to start the engine. With a cold whine the engine came to life and I began setting the temperature controls to high.
I returned back to bed still feeling defeated and completely frustrated, I curled up with the dogs to get warm and wait for the RV to hopefully warm up.
After a short time the appliances in the RV came back to life with chirps and beeps and the furnace kicked in. I ran the engine for a little longer then switched over to the generator. In the morning I searched for the cause and found the extension cord I was using had tripped it’s built in surge protector, but what would have killed the batteries is a mystery to me for the moment.
After a rocky start to the morning, the weather forecast was calling for warmer temperatures. We spent the morning booking RV spots for our next few jumps across Ontario while we waited for the day to warm up, when it did, we replenished the propane and fuel in the RV along with a sani-dump. Tomorrow we leave for Dryden.