Don't ever trek without your mechanic

So here we are in this very nice rv park in Gulfport. The weather is nice and about 75 degrees. One of our neighbors tells us that it is going to rain on Saturday night. I think that this is a chance for us to learn whether Bob's repair on the leak works. The short answer is that it does not. The rain was coming down really hard. I mean REALLY hard. And the wind is blowing. Just before we go to bed we looked to see if it is leaking and the water is dripping by the window. So I pull my pillow away, and put a towel by the window and pray. From my window I can see the flag that Bob has put on the front of the trailer. It is quiet sometimes and moving pretty hard at other times. I think about whether it will be okay and whether the awning will be okay. But it is raining so hard that I am not willing to go out of the trailer and bring in the flag, much less take down the awning. We lie there trying to sleep. We just fall asleep and there is a horrible noise. I look out of the window and the flag is gone. Nothing we can do about it in the pouring rain. (We find out the next morning that the wind sheered off the flag holder and of course that left three holes that had held the screws. Yikes!! Another possible leak.) It pours all night. We get up in the morning and the bed is soaked again. This time the pillow is saved, but the blanket has gotten wet. When we get up Bob is obviously very discouraged. He says that he does not mind fixing things that are broken, but he is frustrated when he cannot tell what is wrong. So we do laundry and dry all of the bedding. We use the trusty brand new hair dryer (by the way it is doing a great job on the ever lenghthening Mo hair). But it is overcast and cold and Bob tells me that there is nothing that he can do when it is under 60 degrees outside. Apparently the caulk won't stick. But at least it is not raining. We leave the bedding all out so that it can really dry and guess what we do. It is too cold and windy to walk, and there is really not much to do here except go to the beach and that is out of the question. So we spend the day in a casino. On the way to the casino - about four miles, we drive right along the ocean. The road is covered in sand. The wind was so strong the night before that it has pushed the beach up on to the road. There is actually only one lane of traffic on this road because the sand is so deep on the other lane. At the casino we win and we lose and we come out almost even. We had a good time and a very good dinner. It was a buffet with all you can eat, including crab. I have not had much crab in my life and I struggled to crack it. I was apparently having enough trouble that the waitress came over with another plate full of crab and showed me how to crack it. Then I had a LOT of crab and felt obligated to eat it. Needless to say I ate too much and the scale showed it this morning, but it was good. We came back and I made the bed and prayed that it would not rain.

It did not rain. We got up this morning and it was cloudy. We decided that if the weather stayed cold we would stay here one more day because the owners of this place were so friendly and helpful that we could get a ladder and the stuff we needed to try to recaulk the trailer here and who knows what would happen if we went somewhere else. We drove along the coast and had a pretty good Mexican lunch. (The only food here is in the casinos and we did not want to go into the casinos. If you don't want casinos, then Mexican is your only option.) We stopped at a Lowe's hardware on the way back to the trailer because the sky had started to clear. By the time we got back it was actually over 60 degrees. So Bob borrowed a ladder from the rv park and started recaulking the entire trailer. About halfway through he notified me that he had found the problem. There actually was a small hole in the top of the trailer where the gutter was attached. It had apparently come apart on some of the difficult roads that we had traveled. That made Bob very relieved - much easier to fix if you can see what the problem is.

It is still chilly here. We still had dinner inside the trailer. It is still windy. I walked about a mile from the park to the ocean to get the pictures of the ocean and the wind was so strong that I did not think I would make it for a while. I guess that is one of the issues of being on a coast.

While we were having dinner tonight Bob was concerned about whether this trailer will make it for the five months of the trek. We actually even talked about what kind of trailer we might want to buy if this one bit the dust. It is interesting that neither one of us thought about aborting the trek. We are really having a good time and all of this is an adventure if you think of it that way. We will handle whatever happens, but I certainly hope that we do not have to think about getting another trailer mid trek.

We only have four days now until we meet my sister in St. Augustine. I am really looking forward to seeing her. We decided to go to the Florida coast and spend the four days there, just south of Tallahassee. Hope the weather is better. I would be very happy if we never had to find out if Bob's fix works.