Flashback to 24 hours earlier. We were headed upstate in the morning to move the RV to a more convenient storage spot with a plan to stay the weekend. I was getting the paperwork together. We needed proof of insurance and the registration. As I pulled the registration out of the file the expiration date jumped out at me. According to the familiar yellow paper I held in my hand, the registration expired on 12/31/14. But we had gotten the registration on 11/24/14. That meant that the registration had only been valid for 37 days! How could that be possible? Weren't all registrations valid for two years? Something was very wrong. We pride ourselves on researching, self-educating, and learning to do all things RV related, or anything, the right way. This was a major failure and an affront to our inner control freak.
The next morning Bill went to the D.M.V. to straighten it out. What we learned: in New York State, RV registrations are only good until the end of that calendar year, something no one ever explained; we had to get new plates; we needed to get the RV inspected, which we’d never done; and we had to request a copy of the title, which we’d never received. So, yes Virginia, a registration can be valid for only 37 freakin’ days.The registration issue having delayed us, I spent that morning on the phone rescheduling everything for the following day. On a referral from the campground where the RV currently resided, I made an appointment for the inspection with a local truck repair shop. Bill returned home and we hit the road several hours later than we’d planned. Due to a few unexpected but necessary stops and heavy traffic, we were way off schedule. Then the day got even better. We had been traveling about three hours and were about an hour from our destination when Bill realized we had forgotten the fifth wheel's battery. We had removed it and stored it at home to save it from freezing during the winter.
Without the battery we would not be able to operate the leveling jacks. We had no choice but to turn around and return to Long Island to retrieve it. With battery in hand, we were back on the road by 7:00AM the next day. We made good time and arrived around 10:30AM. Then we had an issue with the leveling system controls which hindered hitching up. With the help of one of the campground's employee’s we temporarily resolved that and proceeded to the truck mechanic. This is where our luck turned around.
We met two of the nicest guys you could ever want to meet. Mike and Rich of E. Mower & Son are the greatest. They are super friendly and knowledgeable and serve up old fashioned customer service at its best. In addition to the inspection, they offered some terrific advice and welded our entry step, which had been broken since March of last year (but that's another story). On top of that, they tried to bill us for only the cost of the inspection. We were having none of that. If you’re in the Saugerties, NY area and you need RV repairs, we highly recommend this shop. They made our day. Finally, we transported the RV to her new abode and, with a sense of great relief and satisfaction, returned to our own.
This cautionary tale of the perils of being an RVing novice is brought to you by the now slightly less clueless in the hope that we might save others from a similar fate.
-Diane
