Do you often think, “this looks simple – who needs to read directions?” Or, “I don’t need to read the brochure, I’ve done cruises and am a world traveller.” “I don’t need to ask for directions, I have Waze/Garmin.” You get the picture.
When Elaine and Lori went on one of their earlier river cruises they had LOTS of thoughts on what the cruise line should informed passengers on. The young man they were dictating their brilliant thoughts to was attentive and seemed to agree with everything we said. A week later, Lori happened to pick up the booklet on the ship with the do’s and don’ts that one should know……only to read pretty much everything Elaine and Lori had spouted off to make future guests trips more enjoyable. THAT wasn’t embarrassing. The young man however, went up a few notches in their books, as not once did he tell them they had all that information in the package which had arrived prior to the trip.
RVing is no different than a cruise/road trip. Stuff breaks and needs to get fixed. We had our furnace serviced and we were told (given we had a bit of a wasp nest in the vent) to get a metal cage to put over the exhaust vent to avoid this happening again. Seems simple enough. $12 later we had a metal cage with two little clips. How hard is this to put on. Well after some fiddling, then reading the directions, then reading blogs and watching a YouTube video……we ditched the clips and got some wire and wire cutters from the neighbour and ‘macgyvered’ the heck out of it. Voila!!
We have decided we want to track our journey and have purchased a map that you can place on your RV and then fill in the states that you have travelled to. We saw so many other RVs doing this, it seemed like a great idea. Once we got our map it took us forever to get around to putting the map pieces in their appropriate states and place it outside our RV. Well, when we went to pull the whole map off its backing, it didn’t come off the back paper like it was supposed to. VERY frustrating. So Barb decided to call the manufacturer and complain. They were shocked that this had happened as they had never heard of this before, but agreed to send us another one. It arrived and it took us another month to get around to putting this map together. Then we started peeling it off and AGAIN it wasn’t coming off the back properly!! Hmm. Could it be us? Out come the directions………..and yup we were pulling it off at the wrong spot. Sometimes directions are helpful!