As regular followers of my weekly doodles know, we have abandoned normal life – work, home, council rates and so on. – for an indefinite period to get a taste of life on the road.

We met a lot of people who said they wanted to do the same thing, so we threw caution (and sometimes, I think, our sanity) to the wind and gave it a try. We’re doing our best to avoid the big smoke and focus on New Zealand’s smaller towns.

Now when you live in a caravan full time you need to make sure you have certain things every day. Like water. And if you can have hot water, you can consider yourself extremely intelligent.

Unfortunately, the other day I couldn’t, so I didn’t do it.

Luckily we were stopping at a place in a small town where we heard that the guy on the other side of the fence was a real RV and engineering expert.

I’m sure you know the guy. There may even be one where you live. It will probably have old machine parts lying around everywhere. He’s always repairing something in his shed.

Anyway.

We head out to that parking spot, put the trailer in place, and after a lot of effort getting it installed – a necessary condition in our new post-parking life, I’ve discovered – I need a shower .

But there is a problem. I can’t get hot water.

Now here’s the problem. Our caravan is a bit fancy. There are all sorts of whistles and bells, and electronic elements of this and that. And if none of that works, it’s all replicated on one of those apps you can get on your phone.

Unfortunately, I was way behind the pack when it came to being interested in all of this, and even further behind when it came to learning how it all worked.

Fortunately, Ms. P. is an expert – all women are, apparently – and we succeed. Which basically means I press any button whenever I want and if it doesn’t do what I think it should, she fixes everything.

So that’s what I did the other day while I was there, basically in my birthday suit. I pressed all the buttons that seemed appropriate on the wall control panel, and then when that didn’t work, all the ones that seemed equally appropriate on the app.

Long story short, nothing worked. For me or my “in-house” expert. So about an hour later we gave up. I put my complete kit back on and went looking for the Expert Neighbor.

Luckily, he had just finished rebuilding or repairing something and jumped at the chance to come warm us up. So to speak.

“Where is the fuse box ?” » he said eagerly as he arrived on site, impressive electrical testing equipment already in his hands. I have a feeling he could sleep with it.

“I got it online,” he said proudly. “I was looking for an opportunity to use it.”

Unfortunately I couldn’t help him with the location of the fuse box.

We thought it was under the bed but it was something else. Then the black box in one of Mrs. P.’s closets turned out to be a black box. I still don’t know what it is, but it seemed important, so we took everything out of the cupboard to get a good look.

No.

Some time later, I noticed that our expert neighbor’s enthusiasm was wavering. So just to cheer him up a bit, I asked him if he would be willing to test the electrical current on our refrigerator. His eyes lit up and he, or rather his head and shoulders, disappeared into a cupboard below.

While he was gone, I called the dealership’s corporate office and asked for assistance.

Mrs. P grabbed my phone and put the guy on speaker – experience has taught her that it’s best to do this because I’ll forget everything the tech said to me as soon as I put the phone down.

Turns out we don’t have a traditional fuse box, much to Expert Neighbor’s disappointment.

Apparently the best way to fix this particular problem is to open the app and tap the icon that looks like a water drop. There is the letter H written in it.

I’m cringing as I write this now, but I heard myself say, “What does that represent?”

“Hot,” was the response. “Just press it and you will have hot water. Someone must have turned it off.

Sip.

Naturally, I blamed the kids – even though two of them are currently abroad and the other two are on the other side of the country.

The head office technician mumbled a farewell that suggested he had heard it all before and was used to dealing with idiots. The expert neighbor just laughed and went back to get something to fix.

And I went to take a shower.

The next day, Mrs. P and I took a large bag of laundry to the local laundromat – another practice one must do when living on the road.

We washed all of our laundry, then headed over to the large dryer bench across the room, where we threw it into one of the few unused ones. We had about 20 minutes to kill, so we went for a little walk.

When we got back we could see our machine had two minutes left, so we stood next to it and waited.

Oddly, the dryer next to ours didn’t seem to have a door.

Since it was the only one not in use, I deduced that it had been vandalized, with the evil miscreants obviously having ripped the door off its hinges and running away.

“Why would anyone do that?” I said to Mrs. P. “It makes some people wonder, doesn’t it?”

My Beloved nodded solemnly.

As our machine indicated that there was only one minute left, a guy came in and started putting his own items in the “broken” dryer.

I let him go for a while, thinking he would see the door was missing, but he didn’t.

“This one’s broken, buddy,” I said. “The door was torn off. Ours will be finished shortly; you can use it if you want.

He looked at me confused and shook his head.

Then he reached around the front of my machine, grabbed the door of his machine, which was fully open but with his back to mine so I couldn’t see it, and closed it.

Then he said: “I guess you’re the guy from the caravan down the road I heard about in the pub last night.