What's That Sound?

Greetings from beautiful Pismo Beach, CA. We're parked here at the Pismo Coast Village for a few days while painters do their thing to the inside and outside of our house. What a treat to be pulling IN to an RV park on a Sunday night for a change! And, for that simple act, this park rewards us for a free fourth night. So, we're here until Thursday!

Check in here is 4PM, so we weren't in a big hurry to leave our sticks and bricks. It was 12:30 when we hooked the squirrel to the moose and set out on the 250-ish mile drive south. We traveled in intermittent mist and rain about halfway. Then, Mother Nature decided to cooperate and give us a nice dry drive.

Just after we got underway, we heard a strange, but somewhat familiar sound. A high pitched "alarm-ish" tone coming from the driver's side front speaker. We'd heard it before when we were heading back from our Thanksgiving trip down south. Back then, we were convinced it was our satellite radio going through some kind of strange gyrations. We turned the radio off and noise stopped. Simple as that. So when we heard the sound early this afternoon, we did the same thing. Off went the radio and the noise was silenced.

About one hundred miles down the road, we stopped to fill up and break for lunch. Back on the freeway, we heard the sound again. So, off went the radio. Grrrrrr! But, minutes later, the tone blared once again. Boris checked the the dashboard. No lights, no warnings. I checked the fridge and various alarms in the coach, and all was well. We both checked on the squirrel in the rear view camera and all was well. As far as alarms go, we had to admit this was half-assed. It was as if the thing was trying to tell us something was wrong, but it was so intermittent we couldn't figure out what it was.

So it went for the next 30 miles. The weak alarm would sound for a few seconds and we'd do our best to rule out or figure out what was the problem. We rode along in silence because we still weren't sure it wasn't the satellite radio. Grrrrr! When we hit one particular bump, the noise started again. OK, we thought. We're on to something. As the alarm sounded, Boris cupped his hand around the brake controller...and the sound was muffled.

"Holy shit," we exclaimed. Something was wrong with our tow setup! While Boris looked for an exit, I dumped the entire contents of our huge black Winnebago bag on the floor. There wasn't a scrap of paper anywhere about this damn brake controller. With the alarm sounding on and off in a random, meaningless pattern, we spotted the perfect spot to pull off and suss things out. As we began to slow down, the alarm became a constant. We were definitely on to something. As we pulled to a stop, Boris watched the controller. It wasn't working.

As we pulled to a stop along a rather desolate section of 101 in central California, we both had visions of spending the night far away from our intended destination. We hopped out and checked the connections. The pigtail that supplies power from the moose to the squirrel had jiggled loose. Boris secured it again and went inside the coach to hit the brakes. The friendly buzz of the brake controller in the Jeep sounded and we breathed a collective sigh of relief. Within minutes we were back on the road, and the random alarm was silenced.

So, now we know. That sound is our brake controller sounding the alarm that we have lost the power connection to our toad.

And that, as it turns out, is a very good thing.