Driving the "Aliens head" does not permit complacency. Unlike a smaller vehicle even at slow speeds there is simply too much going on and too many things to monitor. This is something I know and I thought about quite a bit before we set out, but no matter what you do, sh!t happens sometimes.
Our second planned campsite was in the town of Beckley, WV at a city owned park in the middle of town. It was several hilly hours from our previous site and as we approached town the first in a chain of events happened. First we were running late, there was spare time built into our schedule but we used most of it up, and reached the campground office around 5:30, about an hour before sunset.
I knew that the office was in a different location than the campground and we needed to get there soon. The campground was up a steep hill and in a tight loop. Some reviews of the park mentioned needing to change camp sites because of space issues with bigger rigs, and I wanted time to navigate all that and set up with daylight.
I was feeling pretty confident about my driving skills after successfully handling a series of long 7% grades on the highway and snaking my way through town after being rerouted around road construction. Finally the last sharp right hand turn to the campground office loomed ahead, co-located in a coal mining museum. I looked ahead trying to see if I could get through the parking lot, it appeared too tight and the best course of action was to continue past and go back with the Hyundai, our chase car.
Now sharp right turns in RVs are a little tough because of something called "off-tracking." The rear wheels follow a different path from the front. A car or SUV does this too, but it usually isn’t noticeable or problematic because those vehicles are smaller. The RVGeeks have a great video showing how a large motor coach handles. In essence the front of the RV needs to overshoot the corner before you start turning. Due to a combination of distracted thought, oncoming traffic, and not following my initial plan, I forgot to follow this rule on a tight road, flanked by ditches…
The result was that the rear passenger tires dropped into the ditch and bounced back out before I knew what was happening. On that brief violent incident, the rim of the inside wheel was dented and promptly started leaking fast. A quick check under the coach didn’t show any other damage, so I limped about two blocks down the road to a parking lot for a damage assessment. There was no visible sign of damage to the undercarriage, but that inside tire was almost flat.
So out came the Good Sam Roadside Assistance card. Initially Laine and I thought we would need to replace it, and since the tire has a few years and miles on it, we would probably need two new tires so the diameters matched. This was seconded by the Good Sam operator who set about hunting two appropriate tires and a mobile installer somewhere close by. Now it turned out that after 6:00pm there weren’t any options coming up, the operator called back regularly to tells us she was still looking. After about two hours, it seemed there was nothing out there.
Now our Bounder is one of the few motor homes out there to carry a spare, I knew it was back there but I also knew it was very old and not very trustworthy. However now it seemed to be our only hope to get rolling without a tow truck. The new plan was to put the spare on so we could drive to a tire shop the next day. We changed our service call with Good Sam to a tire change, not an install. This was much easier to arrange, but it was now getting late and the companies that operated all night apparently were quite busy. The service truck didn’t get to us until 10:30 pm. After a very noisy half hour between his diesel truck and air compressor driven impact wrench, the mechanic replaced the tire with our space and the RV was back on six tires.
We stayed there that night in the parking lot. In the morning, we carefully drove about four miles to the Appalachian Tire Products in Crab Orchard, WV that had our tires in stock. The hope was that so long as the tire on the bent wheel was okay, we could have the shop swap it onto the good spare wheel, and put the old spare tire onto the bent wheel. The shop was short staffed, but everybody came out to look at the situation and the techs agreed the swap could be made. The only trouble was it would take a few hours because they had a couple commercial clients in line ahead of us for new tire installs. Laine and I headed off to a Starbucks for a late breakfast and WiFi. Finally at 3:30pm, the RV was good to go (everything takes longer than you think it will) and the bill came to the grand total of zero dollars. God Bless the Staff at Appalachian Tire Products!
With a sigh of relief we left and drove to a small RV park outside of town, right off the highway with easy pull through spots and a gregarious camp host. Now planted for the next few days, we opened up the slide, so I could get into my liquor cabinet and settle back with a wee dram and put my feet up.