Georg's travel journal – USA 2007
#26 – on the road (9) … and the RV stinks

a smelly story.

If you plan to rent an RV, then make sure it's from a rental that maintain their vehicles properly and provide service if something fail anyway.
<don't cruiseamerica.com> neither maintained nor provided service.

The contraption had not only a leaking valve and missing cap seal, but the dump tank was also half full of old waste from previous users that hadn't been cleaned out by the rental service. Not what one would expect from serious businesses, and impossible to check when we picked up the vehicle.

The stench of the liquid that had started to drip out of the RV's dump tank, couldn't be mistaken for anything but old human excrement. Believe me, a farmer knows what stale old dirt smells like – even if it probably was old American dirt.

(Can't reproduce the stench on a web page, I'm afraid, and you wouldn't like it anyway. Got the leak on video though, since my camera-flash freezes the drops and makes the leak look a lot less serious than it really was.)

What was supposed to be a short stop at the roadside for a cup of coffee, had turned into somewhat of a nightmare. The dark area on the tarmac in front of the RV, is stinking dirt from our dump. We pretty quickly backed the RV off the tarmac onto more absorbant ground, before inspecting the dump-outlet.

Somewhere along the last leg of our journey the dirt-plug that must have blocked the dump-outlet had been shaken loose, and now we were stuck with a veritable stink-bomb that could not be driven anywhere until the problem was fixed. The valve couldn't be closed properly, and we couldn't stop the leak any other way since the rubber-seal on the cap was missing. We weren't about to dump the shit at the roadside either, so we had few options left.

The rental-service didn't care (sure, we called them and talked for hours), and the local police didn't care (sure, we called them too). Finally, after a few hours I got tired of the whole thing, and aimed for a suitable campground. The nearest wouldn't have us when we told them we had a leak, so the second one simply weren't told anything.

To get to the campground we had to drive several hours – in the wrong direction, so by the time we got there it was well over midnight and no-one took any notice anyway. The long detour meant we had also spread some more smelly liquid along the roads, and the dump-outlet had more or less clogged up and stopped leaking, and didn't really smell anymore.

stink all you like, but don't smoke!

It was finally time for that coffee, and – thank God – the rest of the RV was not in too bad a shape, so we could actually boil water on the stove. Impressive!

Ron wasn't quite comfortable with the way his fellow Americans handled the “smelling dirt” crisis, but there wasn't much he could do about it anyway so what the heck.

The next morning we filled the dump tank with water to the brim, and flushed it all down the proper drain at the campground. We repeated this operation twice, as we wanted as much as possible of the dirt deposited by previous users out. The dump tank still wasn't really empty even after that, so the dirt must really have had time to settle in there.

To make sure there would be no more smelly leaks on our journey, I improvised. Someone had lost a cap near the dump station, and I took the rubber-seal out of that and force-fitted it into our own cap. The caps wasn't interchangeable, but close enough in size to make it work. With that seal in place we wouldn't spread smelly dirt until we made a regular stop at another dump station and removed the cap.

So, finally we could start thinking about enjoying our journey again. The smelly matter had cost us a day, but I wasn't about to let it ruin my plans for a “round New England trip” any more than it had. The flat tire at the beginning of our journey had also cost us a day, so all in all we had lost two days in less than a week.

People were expecting us to show up at certain times along the route, and any delay meant we had less time for sightseeing. Having time for unsceduled stops was the most important part of my travel-plan, and now I had wasted more than enough time on this poorly maintained RV.
I sure know one RV rental I won't use on future journeys across the USA.

July 17th.