Things Go Sideways in a Western Town

Perhaps not as great as it looks here!

About day 9 on the 2026 Odyssey, it's what I call a "transition" day. We just spent a few days off grid as it were and we often stop for maybe a day or so somewhere we can empty the RV waste tanks, refill water, restock food, do laundry, all that stuff.

The original plan was to get there early enough where we could do some biking, then all the maintenance stuff and check in at the RV park in the afternoon. Honestly, we try to avoid the the usual RV parks as an actual destination. They're usually crowded, noisy and some are not as well maintained as others. It is, however, a necessary functional stop.

So Cedar City was an obvious choice since it was only a few miles away from our last campsite. Cedar City is between Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. There is a historic district which consists of 100 or so buildings. The city was originally iron works and sheep ranching. The Union Pacific Railroad provided a tourism boom in the early 1900's.

For us though, we're not looking to explore any history today. There's a Walmart, a Starbuck's, a Natural Grocer's, and a laundromat. In addition there is an urgent care facility which we had to make use of when something abruptly came up the night before. Nothing serious, but it had to be addressed before moving on. So we had to skip the biking.

Next was getting the routine maintenance done. Stock up on food, do laundry, etc. Now this town is pictured above as small and quaint, but the reality is, while you can throw a stone from one end of the town to the other, there are probably around 200,000 people here! The population growth has outstripped their infrastructure. They need probably another 50 or so traffic lights. If you want to make a left hand turn coming out of anywhere it will take a half hour!

Finally we arrive at the RV park. It's clean and not very crowded. Nice landscaping. Well-manicured small lawns around the RV sites. There is a section for small rustic cabin rentals. It looks like an RV park mainly for huge rigs that stay a long time. They have no showers or bathrooms here. Yes we are self-sufficient with bathroom and shower but the whole point is to clean up here. And we are typically low on water at that point. Not having a shower at the facility means a few extra steps since we have to refill water to take a shower in the RV, then empty that etc.

None of this is more than an inconvenience at this point. However when we pull in, the first thing we do is activate the slide out. This is about a 2 foot by 7 foot section of the RV that slides out on the drivers side in the kitchen/ dinette area. There is a panel switch in the coach that you press while the engine is running and the parking brake is on. We have had the RV now for about 3 years and never had an issue with the slide out ...until now! We did use it at the previous campsite. However this time when the switch was activated, nothing happened at all. No sounds of any kind.

I did the usual troubleshooting for this sort of thing and got as far as determining there was no voltage getting to the slide controller. The fuse was not blown and there is no breaker for this function. It didn't look like it was going to be a simple fix. Whatever it was, it was going to probably need new parts which we didn't have.

The good news was the slide-out was in the fully retracted position, so we did not have to go through the ordeal of figuring out the manual override for that!

Alright, so it's unfortunate, but not a total show-stopper. A couple feet less space in the coach. There are just the 2 of us so it looks like we should be able to manage. We just have to pivot to "Van Life" for awhile.

Brick oven pizza in town

A suitable remedy for a day that goes sideways is a stop at the local brick oven pizza restaurant! It's all good!

Thanks for reading!

DrDave