Day 3 – Saturday 27th May

We had a relatively peaceful night, although the kids freaked out when a truck turned into the area where we had parked! There was some road noise through the night but it wasn’t enough to keep us awake.

In the morning we tried a few things to see if we could get the power steps working again, such as disconnecting and reconnecting the engine battery, disconnecting some of the cables to the steps, but nothing worked. Mufit went online and found an RV place right in the little town just down the road from where we were staying, so we headed there. It was manned by just one guy but he was as helpful as he could be, telling us that if the light was on under the step (which it was), that we were basically screwed! This meant there was power going to the steps but something wrong with the motor.

Mufit came back to the RV to tell us, and as he opened the door, the steps came down (most of the way) but the motor made a horrible noise. We didn’t know whether this was going to continue to make the noise, but work, or whether it was going to be intermittent. It turned out to be intermittent, with the steps sometimes deciding they wanted to come down, and other times doing nothing at all. At least the steps were most of the way up now, making it safe to drive, so we continued on our way, later than we had planned.

Today we didn’t have a long way to go, travelling down to Davis which is a university and farming town to the west of Sacramento. We had arranged to park on the driveway of Müfit’s (second, or is it third?!) cousin, Orhan, and his wife Sarah.

As we arrived, Sarah merrily greeted us at the end of the driveway. It was more like a small lane that led to their house and two others, and was the perfect spot to park for a couple of nights, close enough to their house that we were able to plug in the power.

Neither Müfit or I had met Sarah (Orhan’s second wife) before, and Müfit realised that the two nights we were going to spend with Orhan would probably amount to more time than they’d ever spent together before!

They took us to a local Chinese restaurant and we had a lovely meal while we left the dogs back in the RV, hoping that Charlie wasn’t going to be howling all the time we weren’t there!