We slept in this morning and had a light breakfast. I called Cherie (of Technomadia) to see if she and Chris were up for a visit today. They are camped at Sunset Isle RV Park just a mile north of Cedar Key, Florida. It is 45 miles from Williston Crossings RV Resort to Sunset Isle and the drive is estimated to take about one hour. Chris answered the phone and indicated that a front was just pushing in off of the Gulf and that it was raining, and was expected to continue for much for much of the day. We agreed that it wasn’t the best day for a visit and decided to stay home and try again tomorrow or the next day. A quick check of the sky showed heavy cloud cover and the weather radar confirmed that the storm front was also going to bring rain to our RV resort, so we decided to get a walk in before it started. It was a short walk as it started raining lightly while we were out!
Living in an RV is obviously different in many ways from living in a fixed dwelling, but in equally many ways it is not different at all. One of the ways they are different is that RVs get moved around and so the environment around them changes. That, in turn, means the pattern of sights, sounds, and smells is always shifting. Even if you stay in one place for a while, as we are currently doing, other RVs still come and go and the external pattern of daily activity changes. I suspect most full- and extended-time RVers enjoying the change in their external environment, but it also means you are constantly exposed to “unexpected” stimuli that draw your attention.
One of the ways fixed and mobile living are the same is that our dwellings each have a unique “personality”, which is to say, they are structures full of systems that have characteristic sights, sounds, and even smells that occur in routine and predictable ways. It’s almost as if they are alive, but we become so accustomed to the personality of our dwelling that we hardly notice it. Indeed, this is essential to being able to live there. If we paid close attention to every little detail of a dwelling we would not be able to do anything else.
As long as it is behaving the way it normally does, we are only dimly aware of our home’s personality or the environment surrounding it. But when there are deviations from the norm we are acutely aware of them and none more so than things that go “bump” in the night. This evening while watching TV we had such a noise. It appeared to come from the cockpit area, possibly from the bay under the driver’s seat, and sounded more mechanical, like our A/C shutters, than like a motor or moving air. That bay is where most of the auxiliary air system components and chassis leveling valves are located, but even when it happened while I was standing right there I could not identify what was causing the sound. I went outside and checked the bay with a flashlight, but nothing looked out of place.
Mid afternoon I had been working in the front TV cabinet and the media cabinet behind the driver’s seat hooking up the cable TV from the resort. The media cabinet has an electric toe-kick heater in the base and I thought perhaps a cable was coming in contact with the fan. I turned the heater off while the noise was happening and it did not go away immediately. It stopped a short time later, but the sound never lasts very long anyway. When trying to figure out what is wrong, it often useful to know what is not wrong.
BTW: I did get the cable hooked up and working and even used the old video switcher to select between OTA TV antenna and cable. We get more channels on the cable but they are marginal quality analog signals and we only get the primary PBS station. We get a much better digital signal over the air and get both of the PBS sub-channels in addition to the main channel. As it was Sunday evening Linda watched Downton Abbey and then we both watch the first episode of Sherlock Holmes. It was a double-episode.
We are probably more sensitive to noises in our coach than we are to noises in our house. For one thing, the coach is a smaller, more intimate space where no noise goes unheard. For another, it’s capable of being stranded right where it sits if the wrong components fail. This is part of RV life, and we are much more comfortable with it than when we started, but not completely at ease yet, especially when something goes bump in the night.