Cookin' with gas - not!

"Into each life some rain must fall," so wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  Indeed, this morning as I sit in the sun tippy-tapping away, the señor has his head stuck into a low kitchen cupboard of the Wolf Pup employing the hand vac to clear out mouse messes.

That constituted our evening last upon arrival at a wooded RV park outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, and our morning today instead of exploring the countryside, as we had naively and hopefully anticipated.

A mousey invasion of the trailer is quite bad enough (they must not have been in here very long or the damage would have been far worse); however, the real kick in the derriére was discovering that pack rats had eaten (yes, eaten!) our propane lines in addition to various and sundry other electrical wires.  

The discovery was made upon arriving in our driveway to pack up for ten days out.  Desperation calls, leaving pathetic messages, waiting for call-backs to every mobile and stationary RV service firm I could locate resulted in two visits from hopeful worker gentlemen, neither of whom could help in the allotted time.

That leads us to our New Mexico early morning rising to remove everything from the cupboards, wash it all, scrub cupboards, dispose of rodents (hopefully) and get ourselves resituated.  The gas lines are a shambles and some sensor wire were evidently quite tasty also, but the good news is that the trailer lights and brakes are in working order.  We will not have a furnace nor a stove for the duration, but we can survive it.  It's kinda awful having the cost and/or time involved in the repairs when we return, but for now, we will continue as planned, although with a bit less time for playing and a bit more time for cleaning - none of it world-ending.

Two of the very-much-in-demand over-booked repair dudes heeded my cries for a miracle, albeit without a solution.

 

 I crawled under the trailer for a quick shot of the gas line remains . . .

. . . and an enthusiastic but in the end non-helpful repair dude spent some time communing with the señor on the underside of the trailer . . .