Day Two: We were still driving in lots of traffic and I was not feeling the love for the RV adventure. I mean, really, we had just gotten started and I was already grumpy. I told Rich “I just don’t see the appeal.” Poor Rich. I know he was worried that I would not like this idea and, two days in, I was confirming it. He noted that it was probably not the best plan to have our first RV trip in southern California with all of the traffic and not much scenery. He assured me it would get better as we made our way past LA. I really was trying to be nice but seriously wondering why anyone would want to do this. It’s hard to maneuver on the streets and hard to find parking and even if there was somewhere I wanted to stop or something I wanted to see, it seemed like it was such a huge hassle to work it out that it was not even worth it. And hours and hours sitting in the RV at night, I hate to say, was not exactly big fun.
We decided to spend the night at Dockweiler RV Park near LA. It’s close to the water and right in the landing pattern for LAX. Not exactly an idyllic countryside RV park! We checked in early because it’s even more complicated to try to park and set up in the dark. Because I was being whiny about having to be stuck in the RV all night, Rich suggested we go somewhere for dinner. I had mixed feelings—yes, I would LOVE to get out but I was nervous about trying to drive around in the dark and potentially getting lost or stuck on a side street where we couldn’t get the damned vehicle maneuvered. In the end, off we went in search for a restaurant. Of course, we headed in one direction where there was nothing whatsoever—well, we saw a few places but there was no parking large enough for us to fit (which confirmed my negative feelings about the vehicle!) Then we turned off the main road to try to turn around and ended up driving some narrow residential streets, which luckily took us back to the main road without having to back up or turn around. Off in the other direction we went and finally came upon a couple of restaurants with large enough off street parking. We picked an Italian place where we seemed a bit under dressed but the waiter was super nice and we had a delicious meal. I did have to say “Now, this seems more like vacation!” haha
So we had killed a good portion of the night by driving around and having dinner, thankfully. :) After more reading and chatting, we turned in early, only to be awakened at 4:27 AM by some sort of alarm beeping. We checked the smoke detector, the carbon monoxide detector, and the propane detector but none of them seemed to be having a problem. The beeping continued so we changed the battery in the smoke detector, which did no good. We re-set the other detectors a couple of times and the beeping continued. We were pretty frustrated and were sure our neighbors were getting annoyed by then. The RV rental company provided us with a manual so we went through all the steps involved in checking everything…and the beeping continued. They have a 24 hour call-in line so we finally broke down and called. The guy answering the phone walked Rich through everything again and it was eventually noted that the propane alarm needed to be re-set (which we’d done more than once already). Whew, finally the damned beeping stopped and we crawled up into our bed but could not go back to sleep. It was after 5 AM by then so we got up at 6 and got ready to hit the road again. As you can imagine, my “RV-ing is fun!” attitude was nowhere to be found. :)
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