In my travels I have noticed a lot of 5ers have those swim noodles on the edges of their bedroom slides. I know why they are there and figured they are good idea. Since my new 5er has a bedroom slide I figured I would get some to put on my slide, I just haven't gotten around to doing it yet.

Guess I waited too long. Today while doing some work in the slide side basement I swung around and walked smack into the edge of the slide. Guess I'll be heading out to the store tomorrow to pick up a noodle or two.

Yesterday I dropped off my faithful travel-mate Spud to the vet. He has a growth on his lip and a few infected teeth. Since he is 18 years old I really wandered if it was a good idea to put him through this. But the growth has been bleeding and I noticed that his teeth were getting pretty bad so at the least the growth had to be taken care of and since they were going to have to put him under, might as well get the teeth taken care of.

Once he was being worked on they found the growth was wider spread then first thought and he had far more tooth infections. After removing the growth they had to do a bit of plastic surgery to reconstruct his lip and ended up pulling 27 teeth. Pretty major stuff for a dog this age to go through.

So far he has been doing well. You can tell he is sore but is eating well (I have to mush up his food) and has been acting as normal as he should considering what he's gone through. He has been a real trooper so far. His mouth should be healed in 3 or 4 weeks and he'll hopefully get back to normal.

I didn't have the growth sent in to be analyzed so we don't know what it was. The vet has real worries that it is cancerous and if it is maybe come back within a month or two. If that happens I'm afraid I'll have to let Spud go in peace as there is no way I would put him through Chemo at his age. Let's hope it doesn't reappear and he can spend a couple more years making trips with me.

Saturday and Sunday was cleaning day on the old trailer to get it ready to sell. The weather was beautiful as it got up to 85 on Sunday. I really should have been camping rather then cleaning but I needed to get to old rig nice and shiny to sell.

On Saturday I removed the two batteries, the inverter and associated wiring. On the inside I took out the TV and custom mounting system. It all went pretty well can came out cleaning leaving little trace that any of it had been installed. Sunday consisted of cleaning it inside and out. That meant a bunch of scrubbing the floors, sinks, counter tops, kitchen appliances and bathroom. It also made me wonder once again why any company would install white flooring and counter tops in a trailer. The designers must have never camped before.

Once done with everything I took it over to B's house to see if I could sell it. There is a lot of traffic that goes by his house so here's hoping someone sees it that has to have it.

I picked up the old trailer from the shop today and brought it home to start stripping out all the things I want to install in the new one. The main items to remove is the 32" LCD TV and swing arm mount plus the inverter that changes 12v to 110v and batteries. They fixed the rear framing and also found a problem with the slide. I thought that I heard some strange noises when I pulled in the slide but just figured it was normal.... it wasn't.

A piece of the wear strip had come loose. The wear strip is what the slide moves over as it is retracted into the trailer for travel or storage. The real problem with fixing this is that they have to over extend the slide to get to the wear strip and to do this they have to remove all of the inside trim around the slide and then crank it out further then normal. Luckily nothing was damaged when the wear strip came loose and all they had to do was screw it back into place. Bad part was the 6 hours of labor at $116 per!

Total bill to fix the frame and the wear strip was $1200 and insurance paid for $500 of the frame damage. Oh well, at least it'll be all fixed up for whoever buys it. This weekend is suppose to be warm so hopefully I can get all the accessories removed from the old trailer so I can take it over to B's house to sale.