Lazy Days, Lost Cat, and Tornado’s

I haven’t posted on the blog for several days.  We’ve had a whirlwind of adventure here and things are just now settling down. 

We dropped the motor home off at Lazy Days on Sunday to fix our problem with leaky slides.  That is the only day they don’t serve free breakfast and lunch!  We had taken the cats over to Mom’s house so they would be out of the motor home and safe.  That in itself was a hassle.

We left our kayaks and bikes at the campsite and our good neighbors (the same ones that walk through our campsite) said they would keep an eye our for our stuff.  Yep, these Canadians are nice people!  In all fairness, they mostly walk through the empty campsite next to us, but they do park in our campsite.  They are not campers, so they just don’t realize a persons campsite is sacred!

After we dropped off the motor home, we toured the Lazy Days Rally Park Campground.  It’s quite a nice place.  I took some pictures and will post them later.  This post is already going to be too long!

It wasn’t any time at all after we dropped the motor home off that we got a call from Tina, our service writer.  She said they did a quick visual check on the slide seals and didn’t see any obvious problems but would need to put it in the “rain bay.”  They noticed that our slide toppers were missing and said they couldn’t put it in the rain bay until we put on new slide toppers.  Tina explained that the toppers keep 90% of the water off and are very important on slide outs.  I don’t know that I buy that because I’ve seen many 5th wheels and some motor homes that don’t have slide toppers.   Our slide toppers had gotten damaged from years of sun and we had intended to replace them ourselves, but just hadn’t gotten it done yet.  I found a place called Rv Slide Toppers where you an order the fabric.  It would have cost about $270 for the fabric, plus tax and shipping.  Of course we would have had to do the labor ourselves.  Much cheaper than Lazy Days price, but that is normal, I guess.

The price for Lazy Days to do this is $650.  At this point we either had to replace the toppers or go pick up the motor home, do the job ourselves and then bring it back.  They were insistent they would not be able to do anything until we had slide toppers. 

We opted to let them replace the fabric, but they wouldn’t have anybody there that could do it until Monday.  We were going to need a place to put the motor home that night, and Tina managed to find a site for us that night. 

Lazy Days is such a huge and busy place.  You just can’t believe how many rv’s there are there at any one time, even on a Sunday.  It’s truly an interesting thing to see!  Tina said they have 273 service bays and over 500 employees.  It wasn’t quite as busy on Sunday, but on Monday most every service bay was full!  Motor homes are parked and driving around the service center, delivery sites, campground and all the roads nearby.  It’s an amazing thing to see….kind of like Disney World!

Tina found us a spot to park the motor home Sunday night at the delivery area, where you get to stay a night if you buy a new/used rv.  We got back there and were pleasantly surprised to find the motor home all backed into the spot, the electric hooked up and the slides out!  They didn’t hook up the water because we had left the water hose at the campground.  We opted to stay the night in the motor home instead of my Mom’s house since all our stuff was there and we felt we’d be more comfortable.  We knew the cats were safe so we didn’t worry.  Monday morning we managed to get the free Lazy Days breakfast.  It was hot oatmeal with peaches and dry cereal.  Not too bad for free!

The picture below is our view.  This is a 45 foot high end Prevost motor home that is only shown by appointment!   I sure would have loved to have driven it home!  What a beautiful coach!

Monday they had to cut and install the fabric on the slide toppers, but didn’t get that finished in time to get it into the rain bay to check for slide leaks.  They have 2 rain bays where it simulates rain.  The water comes from above and the sides, we were told.

So this left us needing a place to park another night.  Tina wasn’t sure they could find us a spot as the delivery sites were all full.  Remember, there was just a big Rv show here and Lazy Days seemed to have sold a LOT of rv’s there.  Tina finally called and said we would be in bay 98 and we could come back to the MH after 6pm.  We had to drive around a while to find bay 98…remember, they have 273!  I didn’t see many empty bays and many had rv’s parked in front of them that were also hooked up to electric.  It’s amazing how they keep track of all of this!

The bays are lighted well and the lights stayed on all night.  It’s a good thing we are not  bothered by lights when we sleep! Our view was  of tool boxes and other motor homes.

The above picture is where we spent night two.  There are rows and rows of service bays.

Tuesday morning we left the motor home and went and got our free breakfast.  We figured we needed to get some free meals to make up for the $650 awning topper bill!  Breakfast on Tuesday was eggs, bacon and grits!  Yumm! 

We intended to hang around for the free lunch but I got a call from my Mom that one of our cats had escaped and was outside!   He had gotten out late Monday night and she didn’t bother to call us until Tuesday morning.  She reasoned that there would have been nothing we could do until it got daylight.  Wrong!   We could have, and would have been out searching.  We were not happy that we weren’t advised he was outside.  This is an inside cat and we were expecting severe weather Tuesday afternoon and evening.  Al and I were extremely upset.  We flew over to Mom’s house and started searching for him.  We walked around, went into the neighbors yards, looked anywhere a cat can hide and called his name.  Nothing.  Then it started to rain, so we resorted to driving around looking for him.  We looked for him most of the day and night Tuesday night.  That was his 2nd night outside. 

There was a cold front moving in from the Gulf of Mexico.  Conditions were right to bring us possible severe weather and tornado’s.  As it turned out there were a few tornado’s that touched down in the area and a few others sited.

Later in the  in the day Tuesday, we got a call from Tiny at Lazy Days to let us know they “rain bay’d” the motor home for 30 minutes and there were no leaks now that the slide-out toppers were replaced.  Okay…but now our bigger issue was our missing kitty!  We decided to take a break from kitty searching, to go pick up the motor home and take it back to the rv park.  We have a freezer in it that needs electricity and we wanted to make sure everything was ready for the big storm that was coming. 

We picked up the motor home, dropped it off at the campground, secured our bikes and kayaks and went back to Mom’s house to look for our kitty.

It started to rain heavily so we had to wait that out.  We spent most of Tuesday night outside driving around looking for him.  We had no idea where he could have gone.  We didn’t know if he wandered off or stayed close to the house.  He’s an inside cat and didn’t know Mom’s area so we didn’t have much hope that he would find his way back to the house.  Plus, we knew he would be terrified and probably wouldn’t come if he heard us calling.

We were exhausted.  I hadn’t eaten anything since my Lazy Days eggs and bacon breakfast.  My stomach was in a knot so I couldn’t eat.  There were lots of tears.  Mom felt real bad.  I was not mad at her for letting him get out…things happen and she didn’t do it on purpose.  I was angry that she didn’t call me right away. He had a 10 hour head start before we even knew he was missing.

On Wednesday, Mom had been walking around her back yard  looking for him.  Al and I just knew he wasn’t around the house because we had covered that area many times.  She came in and said,  “I think I found Noogie.”

We flew outside and sure enough…it was Noogie!  More tears!   He was perfectly fine, but not coming when he was called!   We had searched this area many, many times, but there was a large hole in the ground, possibly from a dog, a gopher tortoise, or an armadillo.  It was deep enough that he could go down inside it. There were two other entrances exits that he could get out.  There were fences from the neighboring yards and it was difficult to see him.  I had to sit out there with a can of food and coax him over.  He finally came to me, I grabbed him and brought him inside!   A happy ending, thank God!  It’s amazing how well a cat can hide and we knew that so we looked very carefully, but he still managed to hide from us.

We spent last night inside the motor home in our campground and it felt so good to be back home with everyone accounted for!  Today will be a day to relax!

It’s been a long hard week!