R TERRY
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, May 23, 2005 - 5:42 pm: | |
Bob, the fellow who lives in the RV to my left, asked, “Why are you laughing?”
“Well, why not?” I replied. I continued laughing.
We were standing in front of my 4104 looking at the unusual damage. He had just explained to me how at 2:30 in the afternoon a microburst had materialized for a brief instant, ripped the tie-down stakes out of the ground and blown the entire awning over to the other side of the bus. Yep, the whole shebang was a mangled mess. The fabric was torn to shreds and only one of the aluminum structural pieces of the awning retained its original shape.
“You think that’s funny?” he asked again. But of course! I didn’t bother to explain that this wasn’t just any old ordinary bus we were gawking at: THIS… was the Salvage Yard on Wheels! Stuff like that happened to this bus all the time!
He was still looking, still amazed. It seemed incomprehensible. There had been no storm of any kind, just a partly cloudy sky with a steady, somewhat gusty wind condition persisting throughout the day. From out of nowhere, a violently destructive column of air swooshed down upon our full RV Park to wreak havoc on just one single RV, the SYOW. No other guests were affected or even aware that an invisible miniature tornado had touched down in their backyard. Curiously, several items on the patio under the awning that could have easily been blown over or become airborne, a la “The Wizard of Oz”, remained in place as if nothing had happened. Bob wasn’t accustomed to seeing weird stuff like that—at least not until he’d been drinking for a while.
For me, this was just another bizarre episode in a long history of such events. I decided long ago—about ten minutes after I first set foot in the bus—if it wasn’t going to be an entertaining experience, then what the hell was I doing with a fifty-year old Greyhound bus that should have been shoved over a cliff?
So far, this year hasn’t been without its FUN. For the third time since I’ve owned the big monster, a plumbing connection failed, flooding the interior of the bus with about 75 gallons of water from the holding tank. What wasn’t soaked up by the carpet eventually seeped out through all the cracks and holes in the floor, ruining all kinds of stuff in the baggage bays below. Unlike the freaky mangled awning episode, that was no laughing matter. If you want your bus to really stink to high heaven for about a week, this is how you do it.
Then, by reversing direction through all those same cracks and holes in the floor came my little never-ending, perpetually hungry buddies, the ten million brown ants that can’t be killed with anything. Anything, that is, except Windex. They HATE that stuff! Instant ant murder. I’m sure if I drank a bottle of that stuff, I’d be dead five seconds later. Oh, Yummy!
And then there was that frightening moment when the fan bearing in the roof air seized up. The sudden squealing, piercing screech was so loud and startling we thought the bus had cracked in half and was about to go down like the Titanic. But that was one disaster that was a good thing. When the A/C “bit the big one”, it put a stop to years of wonton procrastination. The old Brisk Air should have been swapped out before Y2K. But, I’ve got to give credit where credit is surely due. Had the awning held up as well as the Dometic roof A/C had for all those years of brutal use in the blistering Arizona heat, the microburst would have flipped the bus over instead and the awning would still be in one piece.
Yeah, the Brisk Air is THAT good. It’s better than steak sauce.
Anyway, I told Bob the next time something bad happens to his RV, do like me: stand back and laugh it off. As he walked away, I heard him mutter to himself, “I don’t know what’s so funny.”
R TERRY |