It's A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

When Kerri and I were at the spa yesterday afternoon and at dinner last night, it rained on and off, sometimes so hard it was near impossible to see when driving. And when we returned home last night after dinner, the large awning on the curb side of the Airstream (the side where the door is) had been ripped down by the thunderstorms, and one of the struts that supports the awning had been snapped in two. It was almost 9pm when we made this discovery, and it was dark and raining hard. We couldn’t even get in the door, since the awning had fallen in front of it, effectively locking us out in the rain. With some struggling and maneuvering, I was able to get the door open enough for us to squeeze inside out of the rain, but not before my arm had been slapped hard a couple of times by the broken strut, powered by the spring that makes the awning retract (when it hasn’t been broken by a storm).

I slept fitfully last night, occasionally waking and pondering how to get the awning fixed, since it had the potential of being a catch-22: we couldn’t tow the Airstream to a shop to get the awning strut repaired if we couldn’t retract it; and it needed to be repaired so that it would retract properly to be able to be towed.
Luckily, it wasn’t as bad as I had feared, when the morning sun shed some light on the situation. With some strategizing, grunting, groaning, straining, moaning, and tugging, we were able to actually get the awning retracted and secured. Now we can proceed at will down the highway again, and we’ll get it fixed when we return to Dallas. We’ll just do without that awning for the duration of the trip, and I’m very relieved we didn’t get a huge damper laid on our trip.

Might you have guessed that there would be duct tape involved in the temporary fix? Holds the world together, is what I hear.

Maybe even the universe.