#320 Carolina beach family campground trailer park 3 nights

The place where we were staying was really rough

I had really already started this story pretty thoroughly in the previous post.

The wildest thing happened during the process a friend that we had known for 10 years Tom Nugent was in town. We were going to visit and get a bite to eat or something but he had come by right in the midst of all this Insanity when the truck wasn't running. I went back up to the front desk and at this point and Tom had come by and he's just a prince you know and helped me out. I went and talked to the lady at the front desk and started getting things all signed up and settled up and all the above.

You know before I even checked the parking place she said I just don't think that I can rent to you. The owner-manager was on the phone and she said if you want to talk to her that's fine so I talked to the manager and practically had to always beg her to let me stay here. I said I understand your concern but I've certainly parked in some mighty tight spots and I've been full-time for a while so I think I can pull it off. I'd like to try and she said well you're welcome to try but you know we don't want to have any liability for any damage to your rig or anything like that if you can't figure it out.

She said you can do it nightly or weekly or whatever but I said well can we just like if I do it daily can you hold it for me until I get my truck fixed.

They said no really the only way that the spot will be guaranteed is if you pre-pay you can't just ask me to hold it it's a first-come-first-serve kind of thing.

She did say if you pay for 6 nights you get one night free or something like that.

Having no idea how it's going to go with the truck whether it's a big problem or a small problem I have no way of knowing I went ahead and paid for the six rights and got one night free.

Tom Nugent was still hanging out with us and he was pretty cool about taking us to dinner in his car. We had a nice little meal somewhere at Carolina Beach.

He had come to Wilmington where they had lived for a good long time and raised kids but now they have moved to Montana. His daughter is a teenager, maybe 13 and she missed some of her Wilmington friends and he wanted to do a nice Dad Daughter trip. They flew in and he was going to spend several days in Wilmington. All of the stuff that the daughter was going to do was alone with friends so he was just going to hang out of the motel anyway. We tried to hang out as much as we could.

It was like a gift right from heaven that he was there because we would have had to have rented a car or something finished, to go anywhere.

Tom is a good friend

He had things that he was supposed to do basically delivering Marina his daughter here and there so whenever he wasn't really doing anything we would just go to a movie or get a bite to eat or something.

On Saturday the day after we checked in, I decided to do everything that I could to try to solve the problem myself because nobody going to work on the truck on the weekend anyway.

In the past, there had been some ratty wiring over by the air conditioner on the truck that whenever certain wires rub together they give a false signal to the computer. This has made the truck run horribly so I had taken these crappy wires and taped them off to keep that from happening again. I thought I would at least always plan to go back and do that in a more permanent way so today was the day. I figured until you figure out what the problem is, eliminate as many variables as you can.

I went down to this area I'm discussing and there were about six wires involved. I traced them back through the wiring harness to get to the best possible part of the wires. I crimped on butt splices one at a time to replace the individual wires. The implants were probably 12 inches long and recreated the wire from the good part of the wiring harness down to the actual connector it was going to. I can't promise you this was the problem that since it had been on my mind and it was a variable I wanted to have it behind me.

Well sadly after all that it did not run properly yet and I still had no fuel. I guess I wondered if somehow a brand-new fuel pump had gone bad. Because everything is so much complicated I thought maybe the wire that goes to the fuel pump probably comes from the computer.

In an effort just to get to Raleigh or whatever I begin to think if I could find the wire that goes to the fuel pump and just cut it, loose the computerized part and get a 12-volt power source from the battery and run it to a residential light switch under the dash. When I want to go somewhere I turn on the fuel pump and then turn off the fuel pump when I arrive. That would probably get me to Raleigh or at least that was what I was thinking when I started.

As usual I would go online to YouTube or something to try to determine how does one troubleshoot a fuel pump on a Dodge Cummins. They did have several different suggestions and one of them got me to thinking about you know find the actual wire that goes to it and they said that sometimes in an aftermarket situation they run a brand-new wire to a brand-new fuse to the new fuel pump. I looked all around the battery to see will there any fuses that might be blown that said fuel pump. I certainly thought I had looked everywhere but I kept digging a little deeper and you know out of the blue I found a wire that went to one of those little aftermarket fuse holders. I had never noticed it before but there it was and not only was the fuse blown but it was all melted. You know this really makes no sense. A fuse should blow or not blow. When it blows that's the whole point, we don't want the electrical wires to melt and yet that's what it happened. The fuse holder had been hot and melted somehow.

Because I'm a handy man I went to look through my electrical fittings and hardware stash that I've got in the RV. In the tray that's called electrical I found a little fuse holder that I had salvaged from another job. I cut out the old one and put in the new one put in a proper fuse and began to test for fuel. As a side note I had already looked at what is required to change up the fuel filter. While Tom and I were riding around town I bought a new fuel filter for the truck and actually the hood would not stay up so I bought a shock absorber type strap thing that makes the hood work properly. You wouldn't think the struts would be that big of a deal but the hood would literally not stay up. I kept a two-by-four shoved in the area as a prop stick. I finally took the 5 minutes to put the new strut in.

I looked online on how to replace the fuel filter and it was very simple and I had that part off and the fuel filter out and it suggested that you run a little fuel to it to make sure you get in all the debris out. After fixing the unknown fuse it's time to do a test. I turned on the ignition and oh my god fuel was flowing like just an Artesian well.

This gave me such pleasure.

The fuel flow filled up the fuel filter cavity and 5 Seconds and I knew from then on. I had fixed it. I put the fuel filter in and screwed the lid on and attempted to crank the truck. With just a little crank she came right on and purred like a kitten. I was a very happy boy for a dollar or two I replaced a fuse holder and no more problems. Since the fuse holder was out of my salvage it didn't even cost anything.

My next trick was to try to change the prepay of six nights that I was told very clearly was nonrefundable. I mainly just wanted to get me the hell out of this place.

The person that checked me in was a younger lady and she said I'm sorry I'm pretty sure they're pretty serious about the non-refundable. I figured all I can really do is talk to the manager on Monday morning.

I went and talked to the manager and I told her that I'm well aware that the money I paid his non-refundable but I also said that I had no way of knowing that I was going to fix the truck. I really needed to get back to Raleigh. If there was nothing they could do I will understand it's a company policy. Maybe I should just give it away to a tenant. Someone who kind of doesn't have much money and could use a little help paying rent.

Because everybody here is kind of just struggling maybe the guy that helped me get parked could use three nights of free rent. If it's nonrefundable maybe I could transfer it to his account. She seemed to be kind of pleased with my gesture of trying to give it away and said she would give me a refund but she didn't know she had that much cash on hand. I told her she was very kind and I paid with credit card if she wanted to credit the card that would be fine.

She did I was really happy everything went great and as soon as Monday could get here we left. I had been kind of judgy about those kinds of people and yet I began to believe these were some of the nicest people ever. They just kind of fallen on hard times and this is just all they could afford.

I may not want to live here but I ought not act like I'm better than them just because I think I’m all that. It was a nice eye opener for me.