As recently noted, we have become the owners of a nice, near new caravan. That of course meant that we had to sell the tent trailer that we acquired last year, a process that I entered into with some trepidation. I mean who ever has a fun time selling things like cars and caravans?
We stuck signs on it, in the hope that someone might walk past, be pleasantly surprised and inspired and throw a wad of cash at us, but that didn’t seem to have much luck (well not in the first four days at least) and on Thursday, I managed to get around to snapping a couple of photos and posting a free ad on kijiji. It takes about 24 hours before its actually becomes visible to searchers so no one was going to see it until Friday night at best. To be honest, I never expected to hear from anyone as a result of that ad.
On Saturday morning the cell phone rang and It was indeed actually someone interested in coming to see the trailer, so I arranged for them to come after Emily’s soccer. That all went well and the couple departed promising that they’d have a chat and get back to us. Again, I wasn’t building up any hopes and didn’t expect to hear from them until today (Sunday). To my utter delight, they rang back a couple of hours later and decided to buy it from us and came around and put a nice cool grand deposit down until they can get to the bank on Monday.
Commence Euphoria.
Happy dances were done, champagne was put in the fridge … and then it hailed. Big Hail. Centimetre diameter hail stones pounding to the earth and of course all over the camper which we had up to show off.
Fortunately, no damage was done leaving me to wait until everything had dried out to put it down and pack it up for what is to hopefully be the final time. We were favoured with good enough weather to dry it out and so I went out to put it down.
I’d wound the handle perhaps 3 times when something went ‘twang’. I was concerned, but kept winding slowly. Things appeared to be ok, but as I continued, it seemed one corner was coming down quicker than the others. Not a good sign. Further investigation revealed that the cable on that side had gone slack. A very bad sign. And when I tried to wind it up again … only three corners went up. Oh shit.
I went inside at that point and told Caroline, “I think a cable has snapped.” So here I was, in mind of last year, when something went 'sproing' and it took 3 months and a lot of cash to get it repaired. And I had a thousand dollars cash, in my pocket, from the guy that wanted to buy it.
Commence Despair.
There wasn’t much I could do last night though and so rather than get worked up over something I had no control of, I had a couple of drinks, arranged for someone to come and help me raise the roof in the morning and slept on it.
Investigation this morning seemed to suggest that perhaps the cable wasn’t broken. The scary thing was that in order to see where I thought the problem was, cupboards were going to have to be removed fro, inside the camper. Four letter word time.
It was at that point, as we walked all around it time and again, peered underneath at cables and scratched at our heads, that Matt noticed that one cable had two clamps joining it and the other only had one. The cable had simply slipped through one clamp!
15 minutes later, the roof was winding up and down again.
Relief.
Waves and floods of relief. I clamped the lid down and hope to buggery I never; never never ever, have to put it up again. And I hope the new owners have better luck with it than I did.
There’s no winding on the new one! And for the record, a twang is a hell of a lot better than a sproing!
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