Lights. No Lights.

We get up at midnight, so we can leave at 1:00 a.m. and get up to TN early enough to pick up the trailer while it’s still light. It’s all good – we pack up the last minute stuff, and get on the way. First stop for gas is about an hour from the GA border. As we are getting off the exit, some guy pulls up next to us and tells us the trailer lights are blinking. Great. They had been blinking before we left Tampa, but when Hubby checked the plug, it didn’t feel like it was plugged in well enough. He fixed it and it worked fine until that first gas stop.

After we fill the gas hog – which became more of a gas hog towing the trailer – he looks at the lights and they are fine. So we think. As we start to pull out of the service station, they start blinking again. He messes with the plug, they work fine. Try to leave, and the damned lights go out for good this time. WTF.

Hubby figures out what is wrong with them, but he has no tools and no extra wire to fix them. He can’t easily figure which is the ground wire, because it’s not black like it’s supposed to be. And the one thing you don’t want to do is to short out the entire system. So after a couple hours, he finally figures out which one is the ground and manages not to blow anything up in the process.

I go inside to see if this little hole-in-the-wall station has anything useful. Nothing. Of course. WTF. So he finds a piece of wire that is not needed on the cap wiring and uses that to make a ground. Lights are on. We ended up stopping at a bigger station – by now it was light – and they had a roll of wire (of course, it was a truck stop). He wired the stupid ground in, but it is seriously Mickey-moused – but at least it works.

We normally leave at 3:00 a.m. when we go up there – so our two-hour head start was wasted. WTF… Ovah.