Picked up New Travel Trailer & Our First Night in it

We had had an appointment for last Friday at 1:00 at Optimum RV to do our pre-delivery walk-through of the Sonic travel trailer we bought last week. But we got a call Friday morning that some of the techs had called to say they weren't going to be at work that day, so our delivery date was postponed to Monday. 

We left the house this morning around 8:00 and drove up to the dealership in Ocala. We brought Tinker along with us this trip because we were going to go to Silver Springs State Park for a couple of nights camping after we got the travel trailer. We stopped for gas in Belleview at Raceway and paid $2.859 a gallon for premium - the manual for the Honda Pilot says to use premium grade gas instead of regular whenever you're towing anything.

In planning ahead for our stay at the campground at Silver Springs State Park, I had brought a cooler with food that we were going to eat while we were at the campground.

We had the tow bar and sway bars installed

and the brake controller installed.

The techs also removed the exhaust fan in the bathroom and installed the Fantastic Fan Vent in its place. 

Then there was a problem regarding the wiring of the brake controller. The Pilot was already wired for the connections, but the tech didn't realize that it was pre-wired and was going to run a whole new set of wiring to the front of the Pilot. Another tech knew the Pilot was already wired for the brake controller and said that we only needed an adapter to go from 4 wires to 7 wires, so he pulled out the wiring the other tech had installed. Then they had to go to a parts store to get the adapter and that took a while.

So after a long day at the dealership, Mike, Tinker and I were finally headed over to Silver Springs State Park at 7:00. The park closes at sunset and today that was going to be a little before 8:00, so we had plenty of time to get there before the gates were closed.

However - we had just pulled out of the dealership lot onto US-301 and hadn't driven no more than a mile
when a pickup truck pulled up next to us and signaled that there was a problem. We both looked in the side mirrors and could see smoke coming from the trailer's tires - the brakes had locked up!

We found a place to turn around and drove back to the dealership hoping that the techs were still there. Fortunately there had been another couple picking up their new Sonic trailer that afternoon and they had been just getting to leave after us. One of the techs was still there when we got back to the dealership and he called the tech that had been working with us to come back.

The techs helped us back up in the service area and connected us up to water and electric so we could spend the night there. Then tomorrow they would see what was causing the trailer brakes to lock up.

The tech that had been working with us picked up a soda bottle and drank out of it not realizing that there was a bee in it. He said he could feel it stinging him all the way down. We told him that he needed to go to the hospital or a walk-in clinic for medical care.

Not too long after all of this about 7:45, Mike got a call from one of the Rangers at Silver Springs State Park wanting to know it we would still be coming to the campground tonight since we had a reservation. Mike explained the situation and told her that we would be there sometime tomorrow and thanked her for calling to check on us.

I fixed sandwiches for supper and then we've been reading through the instruction manuals. Later on I will make the bed and get some sleep. I'm so glad that we had planned to go camping because we had a couple of days' worth of clothes and food and linens for the bed. We would have had to go to a motel for the night if we hadn't brought all of that stuff.

Hopefully the problem with the brakes won't take all day to fix tomorrow. Spending our first night in our new trailer at the dealership isn't what we had planned.