Jennifer Collins Facebook ad: “If you full-time alone, read this before something breaks.”

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Two years ago I went from a five-bedroom Phoenix house with Mark to a fifth wheel on the road alone. Last Tuesday at nine PM in a Walmart parking lot in Wickenburg, Arizona, the landing gear bolt snapped and I could not get the kingpin off the truck. My name is Jennifer. Sixty four. Retired RN. Thirty one years at Phoenix Children's Hospital surgical recovery. Mark was sixty-five. Structural engineer at Burns and McDonnell for thirty-eight years. He stopped working in November of twenty twenty-three. By March of twenty twenty-four he was no longer with us. We had been talking about full-timing for a decade and the only year we had on the calendar was the year that turned out to be the last year. I sold the Phoenix house in September. Bought a 2020 Grand Design Reflection 303RLS from a couple in Tucson who were trading up. A 2018 Ford F-350 dually with seventy two thousand miles on the clock from a guy on the AZ Owners forum. I have been on the road sixteen months. My daughter in Denver calls me every Sunday. My son in Charlotte calls every Wednesday. They both think I am not going to make it out here. So far I have. Tuesday I drove eighty four miles from a BLM site north of Bullhead City to the Walmart in Wickenburg. I hit the auto level once I got the rig parked. The front landing gear started to extend and then stopped halfway down with a sound I had not heard from a piece of machinery since Mark dropped a transmission jack on a concrete garage floor in nineteen ninety one. I crawled underneath the rig with a flashlight. The shear bolt that holds the gearbox shaft to the landing leg drive on the right side had snapped clean through. The bolt sits in a gap between the motor housing and the frame rail. Maybe three quarters of an inch. I could see it. I could touch it with one finger. There was no way a normal ratchet was going to fit in there. Without that bolt the landing gear could not extend down to take the weight off the kingpin. Without the kingpin coming off the hitch, the F-350 was bolted to the trailer and neither one was going anywhere. I called the closest mobile RV tech first thing Wednesday morning. He was in Surprise. He told me he could come Friday afternoon for a hundred eighty five trip charge and a hundred fifty an hour with a two hour minimum and parts. He told me on the phone he was not sure he had the right tool to reach that bolt either. The Camping World in Mesa told me three weeks for an appointment. I sat on the rear bumper of the F-350 in the Walmart parking lot at ten in the morning and I cried for the first time about a piece of machinery in my life. The Walmart manager came out and told me I could stay one more night but not three. I called my daughter in Denver. She told me to call a tow company. I told her you cannot tow a fifth wheel with the kingpin locked to the truck. A man named Frank parked next to me Wednesday evening. He pulled in with a 2014 Newmar Dutch Star. Sixty eight. Retired from a steel mill in Gary Indiana. He had been listening to me describe my problem on the phone to my son for ten minutes through his open window before he tapped on my side door. He told me to call a man named Wade in Pahrump Nevada. He said Wade did not have a website. Did not take credit cards. Drove a 1998 Dodge with three hundred and eighty thousand miles on it. Forty dollars an hour cash. By referral only. Frank had used him three times in five years on his Dutch Star and Wade had driven to him from Pahrump every single time. I called Wade at seven Wednesday night. He told me he would be in Wickenburg at one in the morning. Wade showed up at one fifteen Thursday morning in a beat up red Dodge 2500 with a creeper, a headlamp, and a coffee that he told me he had reheated in the cab on the drive down. Sixty four years old. Twenty seven years as a UPS truck mechanic at the Las Vegas hub before he retired in twenty seventeen. He crawled under the rig with the creeper. Looked at the broken bolt. Walked back to his truck and came back with a blue steel bar about fifteen inches long. Square drive on one end. A coupling on the other. A fixed bend in the middle. He told me there was a roller chain inside the bar that transferred torque around the bend without the bar flexing. He had been using it on landing gear bolts and inverter mounts and Schwintek slide screws for the last six years. He said it was the only tool he carried that he had never replaced because he had never broken one. He had the new shear bolt torqued in by two AM. He charged me forty dollars an hour for three hours. One hundred twenty in cash. I gave him two hundred and told him to take Marlene out to breakfast in Pahrump on the way home. He laughed. He told me he had been doing this since twenty nineteen and I was the seventeenth solo woman he had pulled out of a Walmart parking lot at one in the morning. I have been on the road another four months since Wickenburg. I bought my own bar from thesavary dot com the week after. Eighty nine dollars. Sold direct only. Wade was very specific that the ones on the platforms looked the same but used universal joints inside instead of the roller chain. Without the chain they fold the second you load them. Same problem you started with. I am sixty four. The kids worry. The rig is the only address I have. If something breaks under the trailer at nine at night I am the one who has to figure it out.

Where the ad sends people

thesavary.com

If you full-time alone, read this before something breaks.

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