Yesterday was a big day in my new fulltimer life: I hauled the fiver on public roads and no one died. I didn’t even ding it. No problems at all, really. One of the fiver’s brakes was a bit squeaky, but that could just be rust. I hope.
The truck handled beautifully. It accelerated well and, more importantly, decelerated well – the brakes worked better than I hoped. As Rosco, my driver trainer, a guy with 20 years of experience driving gas tankers, said, “You’ve got a nice rig here.” “Nice rig” is high praise, I think, among the trucker set.
The joy of my success was somewhat mitigated by a problem that surfaced after I had backed the coach onto our site-of-the-day: the front jacks, needed to raise the RV to ready it for unhitching, didn’t work. No power. I had this image of us traveling for days without being able to unhitch the truck. Or, more likely, delaying our departure (and missing our Saturday night going-away party) until we could get a repairman to find his way to Northwood.
But I tracked down the problem: a blown in-line fuse that I didn’t know existed. Unfortunately, it was a 30-amp fuse, of which I had none. But I did have 2 spare 20-amp fuses and they were sufficient (barely – I blew one and nursed the other by operating the jacks in short bursts) to lift the fiver off the hitch. That allowed me to free the truck and hustle down to the local Camping World to get some fuses. It is 16 miles away, but in NH that qualifies as “local.”
Today we are going to take it out for a second driving session. And by “we” I mean Jett and me. We’ll see how Jett does. She has very little experience in big rigs (unlike me, veteran that I am), so it will be interesting to see how white her knuckles get.