How many Scandinavians does it take to..........

9AM Friday morning, Grand Marais Municipal Campground, on the north shore of

Lake Superior.  Ready to drive north still further, to Thunder Bay, in Canada, our next

adventure.  So proud we were ready to leave so early!

Hook up the trailer.

Check the brake and turn lights on the trailer, Honey.

No lights.

Unplug and replug.

Check again. No lights.

Check connections, check the ground.

No lights.

Ben appears from his motor home (motor bus, if you must know).

Havin’ trouble with yer lights, girls?

Yep says Leslie

Thus began one hour and two minutes of trouble-shootin’, conferencin’,and conversin’

with Ben, Frank, and Wayne,our RV neighbors, who happen to be electrician, plumber, and electronics specialist by trade.

Well, looks like this plugs corroded, eh?  If I had some WD40 I’d spray it in there, but I don’t have any.

We do.

You do?

Yep.

Well, looks like that didn’t fix it, eh?

Wayne got his circuit tester.

Must be a fuse. Have the tool to take this fuse out?

Nope.

It oughta be here....

Nope no tool.  What about a Kelly clamp?

That’ll work,eh.

Nope, not the fuse, looks good.

Must be the ground.

Look, there’s too much goop on the ball for the ground to work.

You need to wipe some of this off.

Nope, still no lights.

It’s the ground that’s bad.  We’ll wire it up for you, but you girls will need to have this looked at.  No, can’t say where there’s an RV place around here.  Maybe down

in Duluth.  You’re not goin’ that way,eh? Well, there’ll be someplace.....you’ll find it.

Ok, we’ll say so long for now............

Say, did you girls know this tail light is half full of water?

Wow, we had no idea, look at that, will ya, Leslie?

We better get that water out of there for you.  I don’t have a phillips head though.

Here, we do, this Craftsman tool set has three different heads.

Well, that didn’t work, it’s all sealed shut.  But how’d the water get in there?

Let’s take this panel off.  Doesn’t come off.

Well, if we had a little drill we could just drill a little hole and let the water out and

you’d never have a problem again.

Well, we didn’t bring the Dremmel drill along.

Well then, I guess we can’t use that then, can we, eh?

You know, you’ve spent so much of your time this morning with us, your wives are going to get upset.

No, no, it’s ok.  The women used to get upset when we would stop to help people, because we were such babe magnets, but now we’re older and the women don’t worry about us anymore.

15 min later, the solution was to stick Wayne’s jack knife under the light and all the water drained out.

10 more minutes of saying goodbyes.  We learned that the three women, Mary Lee, Peggy, Betty Lou are sisters,and Norwegian.  Two “married up”  ie  they married Swedes.  The third married a Norwegian.  The three couples travel regularly together in their three motor homes.  Here they all are.

One hour and two minutes later, the men sadly and the women gratefully waved goodbyes   Or we could still be there talkin’, eh?

PS  Found an RV center in Thunder Bay, and a kind and competent mechanic, who

diagnosed and reconnected the grounding of the electrical system, only charged us

22$, and we had free coffee to boot.  Pretty good, eh?

Written in Appleton, Wisconsin, to be written in another story later..........   Off to Chicago this AM......

    RJ