And just when you think you are having a bad day……..
We are in a Thousand Trails RV park, near Houston, TX. All is well and good. Ha!! Life in the RV isn’t like it used to be. We go to fewer places. There are no once-a-week or so meals at a restaurant. We haven’t spent time in our sticks and bricks house in over a year. In order to keep costs down, we invested in a Thousand Trails membership, so that means a smaller number of parks to choose from and having to bounce to a new park after three weeks, to another for a week, then back to another (or same) park for three weeks. And it means making these reservations as far in advance as our membership allows. We try to keep busy making small changes with the RV, working with the grandchildren (with whom we are caravanning) and as always, making repairs as needed..
Then, there are days like yesterday (just before Christmas). We get up early, take the dogs out, come in, turn on the news, and drink our coffee. Then we both do our mourning routines in the bathroom and get ready for the day. Except during my morning routine, I stepped on the handle to flush the toilet and nothing happened. Sigh…
RV Design Failure
Back home we have two and a half baths. If something is broken in one, it’s a minor inconvenience. In an RV with one bathroom, it’s a bit more than an inconvenience. The good news was there was a bathhouse 100 feet away – a nice shiny new one. But, no, my wife won’t make a trip out to the bathhouse in the middle of the night. The bad news came in waves. I manually forced the valve open to dump its contents and proceeded to remove the toilet and disassemble it. As is so often the case, the valve mechanism 
broke because all the force to operate the valve was passed through a ¼ inch piece of plastic that had an overly large screw forced into it. Total design failure. There was no reason for it to be built that way. The screw split the plastic and a spiral crack eventually broke the pieces apart. Total design failure.
Parts
It was a Thetford toilet – name brand – parts should be common, right? I lost track, I think we called 8 or 10 RV dealerships. Not in stock. Home Depot even claimed to carry it, but I tried half a dozen or more of their stores – all out of stock. Amazon had one – but it would take days to get here (if you can trust delivery times just before Christmas) and neither my wife nor I wanted to go that long without a working bathroom. We started looking for toilets – perhaps one that would be an upgrade from the one we had. Almost no RV dealer had toilets either. The ones that did one or two only had the cheaper made full-plastic models. We lined up several RV dealers on the map and headed out to double-check their parts inventory and perhaps pick up a new toilet no matter how bad.
Now just in case you think we are being picky about our throne room furniture. Our current toilet does have a plastic base (heavy duty) and a porcelain bowl. It accepts residential seats, so we have a good quality padded seat installed on it (and can replace them periodically). I want it back!
New RVs need toilets more than we do.
One of the things several RV parts places told us was that they couldn’t get any inventory. RV manufacturers were snatching up all the inventories of components and parts. Parts that are already in short supply because parts production facilities are not running at capacity either. I think the RV industry will be in for a rude awakening in 2021 when used RVs flood the market. Meanwhile, if any of us need parts, be forewarned, they could be difficult to find.
Did I mention we were near Houston? The entire area is crisscrossed by interstate highways. Four, five lanes sometimes, 3, evebn 4 levels of overpasses. And about half of them are tollways. We put the first place in our GPS – and minutes later it was telling us there was a traffic jam ahead – a 15-minute delay. So, we punched the alternate route. There are large portions of the Houston metro area that are river, marsh, or industrial plants. Thus, getting off the highway and taking a few local roads can end up being quite a detour. By the time we got back on the highway, the blockage was cleared up. But no sooner than we got on, then there was yet another suggested detour. Watching google maps of the city it seemed there wasn’t a ten-mile stretch of highway that wasn’t at least showing orange indicating slowed traffic. Fifty miles took us more than 90 minutes. The first place we stopped only had one plastic toilet and we were not impressed. The second one had three – and we ended up picking one of them and headed for home. A double check showed neither had the repair parts I needed.
Just getting home to RV was a pain.
We usually skip the tollways, but it was nearly impossible. We were fed up with Houston traffic, so we just gave in and hit the Sam Houston tollway. It is all electronic now. No cash – the cash (meaning no transmitter) lane reads license plates. So, I put their website into my phone to see if we were being recorded yet. What I found was a charge from last winter when we went through the Houston area. They never sent a bill, but apparently have lots of room in their database. So, I need to create an account and pay off the old entries and the new ones. I hate to get yet another transmitter just for Texas – we have several states already. We eventually made it home and checked the fit. The toilet would fit, but I needed to change out the water supply connection and I really wanted to install a shutoff valve – so after yet another trip, this time to Home Depot for parts, the toilet was finally installed. (update – to make paying tolls cheaper and easier, we did apply for an emitter – never received it).
We’ve been discussing the possibility of staying in a state park in the middle of nowhere for most of Feb. I hate to think of trying to effect this repair 90 minutes from a parts store…. Oh, wait – I did.
I’ve cleaned and saved the old toilet. Parts are on order and will arrive after Christmas. I’m pretty sure we will reinstall our old favorite toilet (we hate this one) and try to find someone who wants a shiny almost new toilet in their RV.
And, as if all this wasn’t enough, the main present I bought my wife for Christmas arrived – in the form of the WRONG model. That one has gone back, and another is on order.
Another Christmas on the road has come and gone and a new year soon will be too. We hope to be back home by April – perhaps just in time to get our Vaccines.
Stay safe, wear your masks and limit your bubbles.
P.S. Wait, it’s still 2020, right? Covid is still raging, right?
I woke up with abdominal pain – seemed like gas – some sort of lower intestinal upset. And I still think that was part of it. “IT” was there most of the day as a low-level pain. Early evening, it started to get worse, and worse and worse. About nine, after consulting various family medical members, we decided to go to the Hospital ER. I get an initial Triage session – get told they will likely do a CT with contrast. After a couple of hours, in pain, in the waiting room, they do get an IV started and take some blood. Almost three hours after arriving, with steadily increasing pain (9 out of ten), I’m finally taken back into the ER and get my nice comfy bed in the hallway. I can hear the nurses talking at the main nurse’s station just down the hall. Covid seems to pop up in almost every conversation. They shot some pain killer into the IV and give me contrast agent to drink. Once the foul stuff is drunk, I request and get some more pain killer. Then off for the CT after nearly another hour wait. The Dr comes back after a while and tells me it’s a kidney stone. No shit sherlock. He prescribes me two days of meds and tells me if it was not better in 5 days, to come back. It has been something like 30 years since I’ve had one – but my memory was the pain was different. So, they let me out around 2:30 am. I have more pain, on and off for a couple of days. As of this morning, things seem more normal. Now, can I find someone that needs an almost new toilet?
Toilet UPDATE: We posted on the local TT facebook group and a couple of hours later, someone claimed it. The guy remodels RVs and had a use for it. He got it for half price, which, I believe, made us both happy.
A couple of months later – kidney stone pain again – this time, the other side. Another long wait in an ER, another CT, a few more pain meds – and there will be an appointment with another Dr the moment we get home (in a couple of weeks). We are now out of the hell that is Texas, deep in the swamps of Louisiana. It’s different here….
Mike