Easily Confused: RV Newbies

I'm playing catch up on most facets of life, and blogging is no different so this story comes to you from a few weeks ago... 

The weekend when we returned to camping after our adventure to the beach we had a bit of an RV puzzle on our hands... 

Setting the stage: Camping children entered the camper and noticed that it didn't smell like roses ... I thought it was just a bit musty after being closed up for two weeks in 100+ degree temperatures... until someone opened the refrigerator and a horrendous tidal wave of stink filled the whole camper. I'm gasping for fresh air just thinking about it. 

The issue: Somehow we lost power while we were at the beach.  We left things in the refrigerator and freezer thinking it would have power the whole time we were gone.  Bad things happened. 

The Confusion: There are a lot of little buttons on the refrigerator (OK.. like 3 but perhaps we are easily overwhelmed - this is why we need camping!) and it's hard for the untrained eye to see if it is currently running on gas or electric.  After much discussion, trials, errors, and readings of manuals we were quite sure that our refrigerator was BROKE and that it now only ran on gas and not on electric.  I even did some crowd-sourcing and put the issue out to experts on my facebook friends list-  desperate times and all that.  Finally we were sure we needed a repairman and made a few calls. 

The light bulb finally comes on: We happened to run into a fellow camper who said they also had some issues with their fridge that week (the same model even - wahoo) and she recommended to really look closely at those thousands of little buttons (again - just 3) and make sure it is set to auto - which means it runs on electric and then switches to gas if the power goes out).  It is surprisingly hard to distinguish which buttons are engaged.  Turns out after further inspection on day 3 of this conundrum - our refrigerator works absolutely fine on the electric setting and did not work on the gas setting because... wait for it.....we were out of propane. 

Lesson Learned:  So there you go - we learned a lesson the hard way and now you don't have to :-)

What We're Reading: 

This is a fantastic graphic novel about how complicated friendships and fitting in can be at any age.  I read it and I'm going to pass it onto the girls as well - I think they will really like it!