A New Home At Last

It all started at 3:25 p.m. on Feb. 25, 2015, when the newly installed alternator created this nightmare.

Nice new place to chat with friends.

Kitchen area has lots of space...even a dishwasher (bottom left).

The killer feature is the huge (21-feet long) sliding wall on the driver's side.

The interior layout of our new rig. It's 40 feet long, just a couple of feet longer than our previous Alfa.

My heart doctor, Sharif Mehanny, came into the examining room and cheerily asked “How are you?” It was two weeks after our lives had been turned upside down by the fire that destroyed our Alfa motorhome as well as our car. He didn’t know anything about this. But when I told him, he simply said, “Okay. You’ve passed.” I looked at him with questions in my eyes. “I was planning on giving you a stress test today. But if you came through that and you’re still standing, you’ve passed the stress test and we’ll say you’re good enough for another year,” he said.

And that just about sums up the madness we have worked our way through. The rig was totally destroyed on Feb. 25. We watched helplessly as our car, attached to the rear of the rig, simply melted at the front. Then the firefighters arrived on the scene with their circular saws and went to work with a vengeance, cutting at the rear of the motorhome, carving new windows where none had existed, chopping the front of the car so they could expose the engine and gas lines.

They donned their air-breathing apparatus and climbed inside the smoke-filled rig in a desperate attempt to find and rescue our beloved cats, Ian and Fiona. They pulled out Fiona and pumped oxygen into her. Ian didn’t make it. He hid under the sofa, in his “safe place” and he could not be resuscitated.

Jo was whisked away by a fireman, Fiona in her arms, to the closest vet. The fireman took along the body of Ian. Fiona was coughing badly and there was something strange-looking with her front left foot. The vet took care of Ian’s remains and probed Fiona for torn tendons. He graciously provided his services for the cremation and office visit at no charge. And this, it should be noted, was the first act in an almost endless series of kindness and generosity we were to be touched by in the succeeding weeks.

A woman appeared at the side of the highway, offering me a bottle of water. She had come out of the Ford dealership alongside us. Even though she didn’t know me, she offered her home for the night because now, in the blink of an eye, we were officially homeless.

Friends from Honeymoon Island State Park showed up (I think I must have called them!) And our volunteer coordinator from the park, Brooke Horner, was there. She said she had a spare bedroom at her home and we were welcome to use it for a few nights.

As the story took to the airwaves, we found friends we’d never known. A teacher in Largo, just to the south, heard about our plight and offered us the use of her trailer for up to two months.

Our volunteer friends from the park, Joe and Barb, Rita and Ray, threw in their labor the next day, after we rented a van and visited where the rig had been towed. We all systematically stripped the inside of our home of personal belongings. Much of those had to be discarded as the smoke damage was so severe fabric and shoes and sewing machines and iPods and radios all were damaged beyond repair.

The book by the bedside!

One irony I discovered was the book I’d been reading beside our bed, named “Wild Fire” by Nelson DeMille, was half destroyed by the flames back there.

In the two months (minus four days) that followed this catastrophe, there were many days I didn’t think we would make it out the other side. We were heartened by how efficiently Progressive Insurance got on the job and totaled our car, making it easier to come up with a settlement. This allowed us to find and purchase a new (to us) Honda Fit that could be towed behind our next motorhome.

We had a wonderful counseling session with a pair of dear friends with whom we’d sailed through the Bahamas 14 years ago. Tracy and Tom provided very useful thinking about this being a crossroads moment that allows us to change direction and decide if we want to continue our current lifestyle.

We’d already considered that and had come to the conclusion that we are still passionate about living on the road and volunteering in the state park system of Florida. But it was a moment to consider, once again, if we should be replacing our motorhome with a boat so we could resume the journey on the water instead of the land. We decided to stay on the land, however, because there are more opportunities to volunteer.

One of the key ingredients to getting our lives back on track was the creation of a website by our eldest daughter, Lynn. She started a GoFundMe page in which she told our story. She asked me to fill out the financial forms for the site so she would not have to be responsible for transferring money from there to our bank account.

This is a look at our melted medicine cabinet.

Now we were blessed by receiving an influx of funds that grew from a trickle to a torrent. Every morning, I’d receive a text message from GoFundMe, informing me that $1,230 or $435 or $598 had been transmitted electronically to our checking account. 

This came from an almost countless series of lifelong friends, as well as friends of those friends. People we have never met donated to our fund in a supreme act of generosity. By the end of this, we had received more than $8,000 from kind and loving people.

Jo’s knitting friends (she tries to get together with them each Wednesday) cme through with checks and orders for her scrubbies.

You would think all of this kindness would provide us with a sense of well-being. But that fails to account for the troubles we were having every other day with the insurance company for the motorhome. We had astutely insured the motorhome for its agreed value, as opposed to its actual value. This means we did not have to deal with any negotiations regarding depreciation. Ah, but they made up for that by making life incredibly difficult when it came to a paragraph in the policy that allowed us $2,000 for living expenses after an accident. Who knew that living expenses would not include buying sheets and pillows so you can get a night’s sleep? Same for X-rays of the cat’s legs. They informed us they would pay for housing the cat – they’d even pay for housing a horse, they said – but they wanted to see every receipt for every visit to Taco Bell, or Dunkin Donuts or Macdonald’s. When we submitted every receipt for the final tally, the expenses were $1,993.20. And they paid for that.

When we first reported the claim, we were assigned a person to help us and I told him about all of the add-ons to our motorhome in the four years we’d owned it. None of those were covered, he said. So I said I wanted to remove those items from the rig and he said I was entitled to do that because these items were my property. Two months later, however, I am still unable to remove them because the insurance company has put seals on the doors because they have counter sued the manufacturer of the alternator that the fire inspector said was the source of the fire as well as the company that did the installation of the alternator.

To add just a final slice of stress to our lives, the insurance company wired our settlement to our bank but managed to transpose two numbers in our account so the money disappeared down some black banking hole for two weeks.

My nearby bank manager helped us locate the missing funds. But they had to be returned to the insurance company before they could retransmit them to the right account.

While this dance was continuing, Jo and I were on the lookout for a new motorhome. We have come to love the Alfa motorhome line, even though they are no longer being manufactured. We love the high ceilings, the quality woodworking, the basement air conditioning and lots of great design features. It’s also the devil we know versus the devil we don’t know when it comes to another manufacturer.

A series of nationwide searches turned up about five Alfas as far away as Oregon, Houston, TX, Tennessee, Fort Myers and Cocoa on Florida’s east coast. We talked with the dealer in Cocoa and, as luck would have it, he was still smarting from selling the rig to someone who was unable to get financing so he was motivated and agreed to drop the price by $10,000 to something we could consider.

We journeyed across the state and went over the rig with our fine tooth combs. We liked much of what we saw and gave the dealer a deposit. I then went online in an attempt to locate the original owner of the coach. I found his address in Livingston, TX, which meant he was a member of the Escapees motorhome group of which we also are members. I found his phone number on the internet and dialed him. In an incredible coincidence, he told me he currently was in the same town as us, Dunedin, FL, with his new motorhome. We chatted about the old rig and he provided outstanding insights about some issues we had not seen when we went through the motorhome. As a result, I was able to stipulate some required fixes that were quite costly to the dealer.

We awoke last week and I checked into my bank account to find our settlement money was finally nesting there, so off we went across the state to claim our new home. We’re back at Honeymoon Island State Park now for another two weeks. Then we begin our trek north to visit family. All seems well.

Living area, looking forward. We love the huge windows.