The morning of the walk through was completely frantic. After sleeping on the air mattress, we work up early. We still had to load my car with all the Pittsburgh stuff, take out a ton of trash, throw all of the Goodwill remaining items into a vehicle, and clean the apartment some more. We had moved our clothes into the van, but hadn’t moved the refrigerator, kitchen, pantry, or Rubi items in. We woke up at 7am, with the walk through scheduled at noon.
I started on the task of loading up the Golf’s trunk, which went well but took a ton of time. It was packed to the gills, but at least all the items were safely hidden by the trunk cover, so we could leave the car at the marina for Nicole without worrying about it looking like a good break-in target. Right as I was finishing, the movers for our next door neighbor arrived, monopolizing the single elevator. So Liz and I took turns running all everything else down the 3.5 flights of stairs to the garage while the other person cleaned and cleaned. Since the trunk of the Golf was full, we basically just piled all our shit around the car.
At 10:30am, we asked if we could do the walk through at 1pm instead. I also moved the van to an open parking spot on the street in front of the house so we could eventually load it. By 12:30pm, I was sorting through everything in the garage, placing Goodwill items in the Golf, van items in the van, and wondering how we ever managed to accumulate so much stuff. I feared it would NOT all fit in our small space. I also moved the Golf out of the garage so we could turn in all our keys.
When the walk through was over, we were left with this:
After a refreshing sandwich from Subway outside our former home and a nice final visit from our friend Clare, we migrated everything to the marina to repack and further purge. As darkness descended, we were wrapping up and Liz readied herself for a final Goodwill run. Which is when we realized the Golf’s battery was dead. That was battery #1. We were ready to jump the Golf with the van when some guys came over and helped us with their beat up diesel truck. We welcomed not having to move the rig and Liz was off to Goodwill.
I was left in the rig. I put away our dishes and realized the RV’s house battery (for the lights, heater, fridge, etc.) was low. We luckily have a meter that tells us the voltage that the battery in the back is putting out. It should be 12.6V or higher when healthy. Once it gets to 12.0V, it’s only about 60% charged. And if it goes below 11V, you could be in real trouble. Ours was at 8V. I turned on the engine, which should allow the coach battery (the one that starts the car and powers car-related things like the radio and the power windows) to charge the house battery. Normally, that immediately pops the voltage up to 14+V. The van took a moment to turn over and then started. But the house battery stayed at 8V. I started to get worried and figured the best thing to do was to turn off everything that was drawing power and just use our camping lanterns and headlamps.
I told Liz about my concern about the RV, but we were both too focused on making sure the VW recharged so we could leave it at the marina for my sister Nicole, who was planning to fly out the following week and drive it back to Pittsburgh for me. We took a long ride for dinner to recharge the Golf battery, hoping it would work despite it being nighttime and raining.
Since we were also worried about the RV, we took it for a night drive as well, filing up the air in the tires and getting gas so we’d be ready to begin our adventure on Wednesday morning. I checked the voltage the whole drive and for some odd reason it wasn’t budging about 8V.
We knew the battery in the back was a problem, but it was 11pm and we were exhausted. We really needed shore power, meaning a 30 amp plug like they have at RV parks and marinas to give our battery a good charge. We looked to see if we could run our RV cord through the fence back to our old boat slip, since we still had the marina key, but it wouldn’t fit. We decided to go to bed and deal with it in the morning.
Once we found our parking spot for the evening, we tried to start the generator, so it could power the battery. But the battery was so low, it wouldn’t start. It was clear we had killed battery #2. So, we boondocked down by Lake Union, a couple blocks from our old house, on Tuesday night, sleeping without heat and using camping lanterns. The irony is that Liz and I had both watched this video from the Hipster Gypsies, where he was completely freaked out when his battery got to 1V.
We were too green and tired to realized what a pickle we were about to be in.