WDM, IA - What's in Your Fridge?

Here’s an ordinary white double door refrigerator just like any other white double door refrigerator. It sits in our kitchen.

Here’s our refrigerator with the door open. What in the world are we keeping in here?

        A large beer cooler? In our refrigerator? Guess again.

        A large fish well from a boat? Nope, one last try.

        Gary’s Darth Vader costume from last Halloween? Nah, he went as a pirate.

Well, it’s a brake. A brake? Huh?

It’s the supplemental brake we use on the Jeep. When we drive down the highway, and especially when we drive in the mountains, we want to make sure that the Jeep also has a brake and we’re not relying on the RV brake alone to stop all 35,000 lbs. Before we roll down the road, while Gary hitches the Jeep up to the RV, I install the supplemental brake into the Jeep. There are many RV’s who do not have this supplemental brake but many do. Gary and I want to be as safe as possible rolling on down the road and we install our brake every time we hitch up. We noticed several years ago as we were traveling that it wouldn’t start up when the temperatures got below 40 degrees. In this situation, we put it in the Jeep, drive for a while and then try it again. Not safe and we’re not happy campers.

Today, Gary called the factory to explain this and the tech told Gary to start it up. Of course it worked. Don’t things always work when the tech is on the line? And, in our experience, it really only fails when it’s cold. So Gary’s brilliant idea was to make the brake cold and the refrigerator is the best place to do this. Here we are, making our brake cold enough to fail. We left it there over night and Gary hitched it up to run in the morning.

Guess what - it worked perfectly in the morning. Of course, what did we expect? Oh, well, we’ll try again when we’re on the road with the RV.

Tomorrow we are heading on up to Eagan, a suburb of Minneapolis, to attend a funeral for one of Gary’s cousins, only 63 when he died of ALS. His father, Johnny, is still living at the age of 96. This is the second child of 4 that he’s survived.