Virginia Beach Fiasco

After our wonderful day at Hatteras, we headed to Virginia Beach. This was to be our down-time, relaxation between visitors and us visiting Marcus' dad. We tootled into First Landing State Park right around 7 feeling very good! It was a lovely campground and we were looking forward to some carefree frolicking on the beach for the next few days. We all got out and sprung into action. First, we unhooked the trailer and got all chocked and situated. Next, Marcus and Derek took the bikes down from the top of the trailer while I readied the trailer for the raising. I unclipped 3 of the 4 side clips, but Marcus was in the way of the 4th with the bike thing, so I put down the pads as I waited for my turn to get at that corner. Then... I had a senior moment, and forgot. I told Derek all was ready for him to crank the trailer up. He cranked. Apparently it felt a bit stiffer than usual after a few turns, but since it had just been worked on recently, he assumed that was why. He cranked a bit harder. Suddenly we all heard a big snapping sound. Very disturbing! That last clip was still clipped and while 3 corners were being lifted, the 4th was held fast. We had broken the cable in the lift system. We tried valiantly to lift it manually with me cranking and Marcus and Derek lifting, but it was too heavy. We even tried taking off the bike rack and trying again, but still no. We finally had to realize there was no way we were going to be able to sleep in it that night. We had an additional problem in that the trailer has a carbon monoxide detector that beeps if it senses the gas. During our trip, it kept getting knocked funny in the put down process, causing it to think it was almost out of battery. This would initiate a rather loud beeping every 30 seconds to warn us to replace the battery. Well, this was going on at the same time, but we couldn't get the trailer up enough to get to the thing and disconnect it. We were going to have to leave it and hope the battery ran out soon. We spent a long time calling around trying to find a hotel, but they were mostly booked and very expensive. We finally talked to someone who told us they would give us a deal and we headed over. As we were almost there I got a call from the place saying that someone else had booked that room while we had been on the phone, so it was no longer available. We were stuck again. We stopped at a Holiday Inn Express and while they didn't have any rooms, they were very helpful and called around finding us a place. We were told it wasn't nice, but it was clean. True! It was a huge room. It was a cheap room. It was a clean room. It was a smoking room. Ah well, by this time it was 9 at night, we were tired, depressed and hungry. We wandered around town looking for food. We decided on Pizza Hut. It was the longest wait I can remember for a while! What a fiasco! We went back and slept in our nasty motel room. In the morning, Marcus worked his fingers to the bone between internet and cell phone, trying to find a place that could fix our trailer. After all, now we were homeless! No one could fix it for 2-4 WEEKS!! We were left no choice but to load up, and head to Grandpa Smith's place in Berryville, Virginia and try to find someone on the way that we could drop it off with so they could fix it during our stay with Grandpa. We went back to the campground, where we were greeted with cheerful beeping every 30 seconds. The thing went all night. I'm sure those camped around it were mighty pleased! We put our bikes back on the trailer, loaded up and headed off. We were well out of town before we even realized that we never once looked over the dunes to see what the beach looked like! Bummer. After more than an hour of calls, Marcus found our guy! We dropped the trailer off there, and he helped us raise it enough to get our necessities out before we headed to Berryville. We were 2 days early, we were NOT relaxed, nor rested, but we had a place to go.

Lowell and Elyse were in the midst of a major clean up for our arrival. They just needed 2 more days to be ready. We didn't give it to them, poor things! We called them, told them our sad tale and said ready or not here we come! They put us up anyway and we were very glad they did!