"We Can't Keep Living Like This!" The Make-or-Break Moment

In psychology, they call it "decision fatigue." The more decisions you have to make, the more tired your brain becomes, and the harder it gets to make quality decisions. When we made the choice to halt our launch plans for the New Year, suddenly we faced even more decisions, both on the daily as well as looking toward our future. We didn't know when or how we would hit the road, and we didn't know where we would go. At times we felt like we were living in a video game, with obstacles coming at us from every angle. Snowstorm! Hitch problems! No running water! Another snowstorm! Below-freezing temperatures! When every day contains battles such as these and the future is unknown, it's bound to cause a lot of stress. Even deciding where to sleep each night became a daunting task. Do we sleep in the trailer where all our stuff is, even though it doesn't have running water, or do we pack up a few things and stay in the house? Where will the pets sleep? Where will we do our work in the morning? We were already missing adventure, but now we were also missing routine.

We're not painting a pretty picture, we know. However, we will say that the decision to delay our launch was 100% a good one. If we had rushed out, we would have been on the road, overwhelmed, discovering that our RV needed all these repairs. Despite all the decisions we faced staying in MA, we relieved ourselves of new ones, like "Where can we get our new water pump delivered while we're on the road?" and "Where can we stay in the winter that has running water?" We're very thankful that Nicole's parents let us use their house as a home base while we got everything taken care of.

One night, we were woken up by freezing temperatures, realizing that our propane furnace wasn't working. At 2am, we were lying in bed, going over what could possibly be wrong. We didn't think we'd run out of propane, but perhaps the furnace was using more because the temperatures were in single digits. Maybe there's something wrong with our furnace. Or anything in between. That was when we agreed, we can't keep living like this. If one more big thing goes wrong with this RV, we're not going. We need to take traveling off the table for our own sanity. But, if the water pump gets fixed AND we can figure out our heat situation, we need to try and get out of MA before another obstacle stops us. We just want our main resources for living: heat, water, electricity. The rest we can figure out as we go.

Turns out we had just run out of propane, but the reason was worrisome. We had had enough propane to run the furnace for the night, but evidently our hot water heater, which also runs off propane, was trying to kick on all night. No water pump = no water, which our water heater should have detected, but it was malfunctioning. We didn't know if it was solely because of our broken water pump, or if it was an issue with the water heater itself. That we wouldn't be able to find out until our water pump was fixed.

After a couple of delays in ATC shipping our water pump, we got our tracking/delivery information and were able to schedule a mobile tech to come install it. Monday morning, February 21, was a defining moment. First, we needed to be correct in our diagnosis of our dead pump. We still weren't sure on this, because there's always the chance that the pump is malfunctioning due to a leak in the water lines. We checked for leaks and couldn't find anything, so this was our best guess, but best guesses can be wrong. If the pump was in fact dead, the new one needed to work. We weren't very enlightened when we watched a timely video of full-time RVers who had a dead pump, and replaced it with a new pump - that also happened to be dead! (Watching RV vlogs when you're having RV issues is very similar to researching illnesses on the internet when you're feeling sick. Do it at your own risk). Then, if the new pump does in fact work, we need to also check the hot water heater, to see if that has its own issue, or if it was just responding to the pump issues. Whew! As Nicole's mom likes to say, "What's Zen about this, guys?!" But, everything is a trade-off. Gotta get these things figured out if we want to live a life of adventure and simplicity.

So there we were Monday morning, awaiting the news. Would the new water pump solve our water issues completely, hot water included? If the answer was "no," we'd start looking for a rental to hang our hats for a while. If the answer was "yes," we'd finally hit the road. It all comes down to this, folks.

To be continued...