Dead Battery Meltdown

December 30, 2025

I forgot to mention that I had a slightly sore throat for several days while we were in St. Louis. Slightly sore, as in definitely something but hopefully nothing serious. Unfortunately, by the time we got to the airport to fly home, it had blossomed into a full-on fever and chills situation.

To anyone I may have infected on that plane: I am truly sorry. If you caught what I had, just know it’s a long one. It lingers for more than a week and involves an unreasonable number of tissues and a lot of mouth breathing. Probably the flu strain that quietly escaped the vaccine this year.

We are back in Phoenix. Again.

After sleeping in to recover from our 1 a.m. arrival, we did errands. We picked up the last remaining package we’d left at Alan’s in-laws’ house, along with the fridge condiments we had stored there. We announced—confidently—that we were leaving Arizona for real this time and would not see the Eriksons until their daughter (our daughter-in-law) Celeste’s graduation in April. This felt important to say out loud, even though history suggests otherwise.

We dropped off our junker luggage at Goodwill and washed the car. George loves a car wash in a way that suggests something formative happened in his childhood involving a dirty windshield. This one was exceptional. It had free vacuums, an endless supply of clean, perfectly moist towels for wiping and drying, and unlimited dash towellettes that you could discreetly pocket for later.

We spent a solid hour there using those towels to make everything sparkle. At some point I wondered if we had accidentally discovered our post-travel business plan. Forget law—premium towel access at the car wash is clearly the future.

Next, we picked up the camper from storage, which continues to be an educational experience in refrigerator management.

The first time we left it—when we went to the Channel Islands—we didn’t leave it level, the gas shut itself off, and all the food spoiled. The second time—Thanksgiving—we left the gas on and the camper level, but the battery ran itself down under covered parking with no solar. This third time, we emptied the fridge and turned off the gas… but forgot to leave the fridge open.

It is impressive how much mold can grow in a week.

On the bright side, the fridge is now spotless, and that faint but persistent odor from before is completely gone. So really, progress is being made.

After reassembling the camper and the car, we went grocery shopping. That’s when we realized the camper batteries weren’t charging properly. George assumed the batteries were simply dead. They were five years old, and we had let them run almost all the way down over Thanksgiving, which is apparently a very bad thing to do.

So George rushed into Costco right before closing to buy new batteries, while I stayed behind and tore apart the bed. This is one of my least favorite camper activities. As this bettery story continues, tearing the bed apart and putting it back together will become a recurring theme.

Of course, the batteries were the wrong ones, and Costco did not carry the right ones. So I put the bed back together.

While we were sitting there assessing the situation, George realized the car wasn’t charging the camper batteries either. Things were officially escalating. When George gets stressed, it becomes Pick On Wendy Time. If I stand back, I get snapped at. If I try to help, I get snapped at. For best results, I should not speak unless spoken to, and all my ideas are terrible.

I suspect this may be a common stress response among many men? Possibly? Thankfully, after 31 years, I’ve learned how to manage these moments. They no longer end with me crying. They end with some surprisingly effective teamwork and George apologizing. Eventually.

While he was spiraling, I did my own research and discovered that our car has a fuse that enables trailer charging. I very carefully asked—because tone matters—if he had checked the car’s fuse.

He snapped that if I thought that was the problem, I should figure out which fuse it was. Apparently there are many.

Thank goodness for Google. It provided a fully labeled diagram. Only four fuses mentioned the word “trailer,” which narrowed things down nicely. George found the right one, but his fuse puller didn’t fit. I then produced my assortment of tweezers (a sentence I never expected to write), and one of them worked perfectly.

Indeed, the fuse was blown.

We raced to AutoZone before it closed at 10 p.m., hoping they had the right fuse. They did. But unfortunately, the fuse only solved part of the problem—the batteries really were dying—but now the car could at least charge them enough to limp along until we could replace them properly.

It was late when we finally headed to our trusty semi-homeless camp on the west side of Tucson. It’s starting to feel like our second home. Or possibly tied with Alan’s in-laws’ house.

As we pulled in, we were hoping—but not expecting—that it would still be garbage-free. To our surprise, it was. That alone felt like the best Christmas present we could have asked for and a much needed uplift from our semi-depressed state over our batteries. We also noticed that all the permanent campers were gone. BLM management must have followed through on their promise to visit the place after we cleaned up and disposed of all the garbage. To refresh your memory, we picked up 30+ bags of garbage, paid $150 to haul them away, and posted homemade signs. The signs were still there.

I admit I feel a little bad about the homeless campers being forced out, but once they were gone, so was the garbage problem. I suppose the moral of the story is this: if you are homeless, take your trash to a proper trash can and you will be less likely to get kicked off the free BLM land you call home.