Day 61 – Stormy Weather And The Locked Door.
It was supposed to rain hard beginning around noon so we did our scenic drives early. Humid and cloudy. We started with Catahoula National Wildlife Refuge. It was located in Rhinehart, LA and was about ½ hour from our campground. It was very pretty and we took pictures of flowers, bugs (don’t cringe), & scenery. Saw plenty of birds, too, but we already had those pics. Clouds were rolling in so we headed back to the campground, but first we stopped at Bayou Cocodrie National Wildlife Refuge and drove through. This place deserves another visit when we have more time.
As we were pulling into the campground, the first drops of rain hit. We rushed inside, had lunch, and Rob & the cats settled in for naps. I was reading & kept looking outside; the black clouds rolling in had me interested. Although storming, it was really beautiful out. Finally, I just had to go take some pictures & I was very careful not to wake everyone up. Headed outside & the wind was so strong that it ripped the RV door & screen door out of my hands & slammed them into the side of the RV & a slide-out. NOW everyone was awake. With the bang of the doors, Rob stumbled up and was like, “Huh? What’s going on? Eh? What was that noise?”, and I said, “Sorry, I just wanted to get a picture of this storm”, so he stumbled outside behind me, barefooted and without a rain jacket, and somehow the door to the RV locked behind him when he shut it. Took those pictures and went to go back inside out of the wind and rain and VOILA, the door is locked and the keys are inside the RV along with the cats. The cell phone is inside the RV; the keys to the car are in the RV; all tools are locked in the RV and car; wallets are in the RV; and neither of us have jackets and Rob has no shoes. Uh-oh.
While Rob was circling the RV endlessly trying to find a solution (I should mention that because of the rain, all windows were shut and locked, too), I headed around the campground to try to get help. Neighbors a couple of sites down responded and an entire, extended family came back with me to our site. All the men spent quite a bit of time coming up with solution after solution but nothing was working. A woman wandered around the campground trying to find a piece of wire she’d seen earlier, found it, and brought it back to us. That didn’t work to pry open the doors and windows, neither did peeling off the seals around the windows and trying to pry them open. They tried taking the screens off the ceiling vent and fan/skylight. They even volunteered a small child to send down the hole onto the kitchen table, then onto the floor and over to the door to open it from the inside. We rejected this idea. They phoned a local auto repair place to see if they could send someone to unlock the door; that person was not working today which happened to be a Saturday, the day before Easter. Our extended warranty has free locksmith service but a phone and contract number is needed to reach them and get service. Rob tried to trip the door lock by prying around the edge of the door. He tried to pry the window glass out of the frame. The one positive thing we learned from all these efforts is that we’re now virtually certain that the RV is secure and sturdily constructed. One of the younger members of the extended family started advocating for the use of an axe to break in. Initially we were horrified by this suggestion, but…….
Eventually it was decided that the least destructive approach was to break the small entry-door window. The axe was immediately provided. Cooler heads prevailed and a tire iron was used to break the window, which broke into 50 million tiny pieces, allowing Rob to reach in & unlock the door. The next several hours were spent cleaning up the mess and sealing the window with a garbage bag for our trip early the next morning to Arkansas.
Temporary Repair to broken door window, Lakeview Paradise RV Resort, Jonesville, LA
The neighbors were wonderful and we’ll always be grateful, but we were exhausted and soaking wet, and the cats were nowhere to be seen, hiding under the couch because of the trauma from people banging on the RV for hours. Sigh.
Sunset from inside the RV, Lakeview Paradise RV Resort, Jonesville, LA
Lakeview Paradise RV Resort, 3873 Highway 129, Jonesville, LA 71343, (318) 386-0300 http://lakeviewparadise.com/. This was a new campground, in fact they are still working on adding more sites. There are 14 sites right on the Lake, which is popular with fisherman. As you enter the campground, there’s a building for the office of the Marina, the campground office is behind that and separate from the Marina. The first 4 or so sites are on the Marina/boat launch and they probably have on-going noise from boats being launched and returning from the Lake. The remaining lake side sites are quiet, the campground was quiet, and the Lake was lovely. Even though it’s called an “RV Resort” and there are full hook-ups, it’s more of a fishing/boating campground, and other resort amenities do not exist. We had site #13 and we really liked it here and would return.