Well, yesterday turned out to be good news and bad news. We got up about 0700 and after coffee and breakfast finished breaking camp and hitching up the rig and headed out shortly after 0930. After a quick stop for gas for the Mazda (got fuel for BAT the day before) we headed out on 16 West; a single road all the way to our destination at Jasper National Park’s Whistler Campground. Connie was having a really good day and was feeling much better about life than she was the past couple of days…she’s having troubles getting her VPN to the college back in Virginia to work and was stressing over that.
About halfway here it started raining and pretty much rained steady for the second half of our drive. By the time we pulled into Whistler Campground it had decreased to an on and off again drizzle so we got checked in and started setting up.
That’s when the bad news came in. After leveling and hooking up utilities we deployed the bedroom and kitchen slides normally but the living room slide would not go out…well, at least the rear end isn’t going out. The hydraulics mechanism is working and the front extends but the back doesn’t move. After some crawling under the coach and fiddling with things it looks like the linkage between the hydraulics (which is at the front of the slide) and the rear extending mechanism isn’t working properly. So; we pulled the living room slide all the way in which gives us pretty much no room back in the living area of the coach.
We have no internet here in the campground so we drove into Jaspe and found the visitor info place…sending off an email to New Horizons to figure out how to get it fixed. There isn’t much in the way of RV repair here in Jasper but there is a larger city named Hinton about a half hour east that has some RV dealers. We haven’t figured out whether we need to just get it fixed ourselves and send the bill to New Horizons or whether to wait on Ken from New Horizons to coordinate a repair location…we’ll talk about it again in a bit when Connie wakes up and we have some coffee and make a decision which way to proceed.
On the bright side; today is supposed to be a beautiful day so if waiting to hear from Ken is our decision we should be able to go on a hike or something fun to take our minds off of our troubles.
The park rangers told us on checkin yesterday that they’ve seen 4 grizzly bears in the campground this week (well, guess it was actually last week since it was only Monday when we checked in)…we did see 3 elk by the roadside in the campground on the way in. Here’s a shot of our site 58N here in the campground…it’s nice and wooded but amazingly enough we still have enough sky visibility to get 2 out of 3 of the DirectTV satellites; so we have some channels at least. Not all the ones we usually watch and no HD…so I guess that qualifies as roughing it.
Hopefully we’ll hear something on getting the slide repaired today.
Cyas.
Travels with Gunther and Kara 
hi g + k – sorry to hear ’bout the camper trouble – should be a warranty issue and covered either way (based on what’s most convienent fer yall)… if NH can’t coordinate local repairs u may have to get what u can done locally +send ’em the bill… looking forward to pix, how was the concert? hope yall are way the heck away from ANY garbage cans/trash facilities, last i heard ‘dem bears ain’t tame… yall have a good time, just please be mindful in ‘dem woods – canya/willya/doya carry bear spray? i think i would… i’d much rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it… anyway, glad yall are doin’ good, keep me and sis posted when u can.
ron
Yeah, we’re going to just get it fixed by a local guy…he’s supposed to come and fix it tomorrow. I’ll just pay the bill and then bug NH for reimbursement. We’re aways from the nearest dumpster in the campground…check out today’s post and you’ll see the brown or grizzly that crossed the road a couple hundred yards in front of us. Rolled up on him on the shoulder and took some photos from maybe 10 or 15 yards away; but we stayed in the car and took them through the window just in case. He/she was more interested in eating plant shoots than looking at us though…they’re really used to people up here. Connie wants some bear spray just in case; we gotta go find some in the next day or so.