March 6, 2011

Laundry day at the Oasis

Laundry day. Not usually a laugh-a-minute kind of day. However, I did get a chuckle or two with what I found near the laundry room.

There’s a space right next to the laundry facilities, but for some reason, it was occupied by a near new Monaco RV. Now, the Monaco is an expensive piece of kit. So I would assume that the person occupying such a high-end RV would have at least the knowledge of hooking and unhooking utilities.

The Monaco is a Class A type RV, which means it’s built on one of those huge, 40 feet long busses. You know, the ones with luggage storage under where the passengers sit. Well, with Class A RV’s of this caliber, the passenger seats aren’t put in, and they build it up for living area, and the luggage storage is kept mostly for luggage storage, but at least two of the locations are used for access to the shore water (fresh water for bathing/cleaning/drinking), the black and gray water tanks (where the runoff from the shower and toilets go) and electricity. Now, most of the time with these class of RV’s, all of these connections can be made on the underside of the RV, which most people do, and it makes it look a lot cleaner than what this guy did.

He opened the locations, plugged in the shore water and his sewer tube, and then closed the locations on top of it. Apparently, he either didn’t have the time to properly connect, or it must have been his first time out. I wouldn’t think the way he had it would have caused a problem, however, the copious amount of what appeared to be clear water was running out of the storage locations.

This is a problem. Where is it coming from, and what type of ‘liquid’ is it? Fresh water, gray, or even possibly black? It didn’t smell, and wasn’t of the appropriate color, so I was guessing that someone was taking a shower when all this happened.

So I did what anyone else probably would do. I went in the laundry room and started doing my laundry. After a couple of minutes, another man came into the room and started folding his clothes. “Ok, so which one of us is going to tell the Monaco he’s leaking so much he’s creating his own pond?” He looks, and says “Wow. He’s really leaking, isn’t he?” That’s all I needed. I walked up to the Monaco.

Right next to the front door they had a sign, “Beware of Dog.” This is going to be interesting. I knock, and was greeting by loud barking, the kind of barking a small, harmless wire-haired terrier could bark. I was greeted by an older woman, dressed in plaid pajamas, with furry slippers to top off the outfit.

 “What?”

“Hey, you are leaking very badly.”

 “What?”

I point to what is now a small pond underneath her RV. Her response can’t be adequately summed up in words. It was a kind of response like “I fear you are speaking some sort of foreign language that I can’t understand. Thanks for stopping by!”. However, after I pointed to Lake Monaco, gave her the ‘you need to look at it now’ look did it dawn on her that maybe she should look at it.

She walked to where the hookups were, and looked at it quizzically. I guessed that maybe she knew what was going on. I did feel a little badly that her furry slippers were now soaked. Not a pleasant way to start the day. I went back into the laundry room to finish what I started, thinking she was going to be ok. What greeted me on my exit was a bit shocking, but not wholly unexpected.

It was an entire family on a trip. Grandma, son, grandson were all removed from the relative comfort of their RV, and were now staring at the waterfall coming out from under the RV, as well as springing from other storage locations on the bottom. It was a beautifully horrific sight. Now, here’s the thing that I didn’t think about until much later. What was in those other storage locations? I’m hoping it wasn’t too important, or would at least dry out quickly. And hopefully, they took the time to dry out the locations.

I assume they didn’t. When I went back to put the laundry in the dryer, they were long gone. However, the pond remained for a while. Just goes to show you that more expensive sure doesn’t mean a smarter owner.

see you down the road!
Richard