"Eventful" travel to San Antonio

Saturday, March 23rd was a travel day for us.

Shortly after we got on the road at 9:30 am, we could both hear air releasing or "puffing" out of our rear suspension. It is normal for the secondary air PSI to be in the 100 to 150 range, but it would build up to 120 or so and then release a "puff" every 30 seconds or so. Chad was driving so I got on my phone to Google and find a number for Newmar (the manufacturer of our rig) and Freightliner (we have a M2-106 chassis). Luckily, Freightliner has a 24/7 customer support line and the mechanic there said as long as the PSI didn't drop below 70 we were okay to drive on it, but we probably had a leak.

That was somewhat reassuring. We called a couple Freightliner service centers about 50 miles away, but they were either not available or wouldn't be available until "later that afternoon", so we kept on our way. We had a planned stop at a Love's truck stop in Sonora, TX who happened to also have a Freightliner Express shop.

When we stopped to re-fuel, we got on the waitlist to be seen in the repair shop.

Almost two hours later, Chad was able to back the rig into their shop for them to diagnose the problem.

We had a broken level valve which is attached to the rear axle.

Our theory as to what caused it: At the last RV park, when we hit auto-level, the jacks raised the back tires off the ground a bit. We don't like to have the tires "flying" so we manually lowered the jacks down a bit. We think that over-extension made the rod slip out of its housing, which broke the leveling valve/rod. Then it dropped the axle down on the one air bag in a weird position that created a puncture of sorts.

The Love's shop was able to replace the level valve, but did not have a replacement air bag in stock.

We made the hard decision to continue on our journey with fingers crossed that we could make it to San Antonio without the PSI dropping too low.

Only cool thing about our stop at Love's is seeing two truckloads of Tesla's Cybertruck! We are Tesla fans, if you didn't know.

We made the 180 mile drive to the RV park in San Antonio and arrived at about 7:45 pm. Success!

Sun setting as we arrived at our site in San Antonio.

Chad found a mobile RV tech that was available to take a look at our parked rig on Tuesday. He replaced the air bag in less than an hour! The best news of all was that the work and the part were covered under warranty, so we only need to pay for the express freight charge of ~$70. That was quite a pleasant shock when the estimate was closer to $1200! Thank you, warranty!

Damaged airbag

New airbag

The plan is to check out downtown San Antonio this weekend for a better kind of "eventful" weekend!