Wendy and I are avid, if not particularly good, golfers. One of the cornerstones of our retirement plan is to golf our way across the United States and Canada. For the last several years we have carried a Kentucky Parks golf pass, and we had long planned to make it to Dale Hollow in eastern Kentucky to play the course there. Every previous attempt had been rained out. And since the trip required staying in a hotel, we always ended up canceling. Paying hotel rates just to watch rain pound the fairways never felt like a good deal.

Now that we had the RV, that calculation changed. We could stay there relatively cheaply, rain or not. So we booked a campsite for a three night stay. It would be our first real test of RV living.

I had been traveling for work, and when I finally got home Wendy greeted me with news of our first RV glitch. She had extended the slide out and could not get it to retract. She tried the wall computer panel. She tried the app. Nothing worked.

Of course, I walked in, pressed the button, and the slide out closed immediately. Problem solved. We loaded up beer, golf clubs, and far more gear than we probably needed, and hit the road.

Once we reached the highway, Wendy high fived me as soon as we settled into cruising speed. Seventy miles an hour came easily. The Beast barely noticed the RV behind it, and holding highway speed was effortless. The floating was gone and she handled like a dream.

Stopping, however, was another matter. The RV had serious weight, and the trailer brakes needed to be dialed in just right so they engaged smoothly with the truck. I nearly missed an exit and took it a little hotter than planned. The result was the refrigerator door flying open and dumping some of its contents onto the floor. It was our first reminder that everything inside the RV will become airborne if not properly secured.

We made it to the Dale Hollow campground, which was a beautiful spot, even if it was packed tight. Trucks, campers, and boats were wedged in everywhere. Backing the rig into our site required threading a needle around parked vehicles and boat trailers. To their credit, most of the other campers were great about moving their trucks so we could get in without incident.

The golf course at Dale Hollow is one of my favorite courses in Kentucky. It’s challenging from start to finish, with plenty of hills, uneven terrain, and elevation changes that will test your game. But the challenge is well worth it. The course is beautifully maintained, and the scenery is spectacular.

If you’re a golfer camping in the Dale Hollow area, this is a must-play. Just be sure to book a tee time in advance, as the course can get pretty busy.

So, we played golf, built a campfire, and broke out the cards in the evenings. We also spent a surprising amount of time figuring out where everything should live inside the RV, and where we could stow things so they would not try to escape the next time we hit the brakes.

The Golf course at Dale Hollow is one of my favorites in Kentucky. It is extremely challenging with lots of hills uneven terrain and beautiful scenery. It is also extremely well kept and a must play if you are a golfer camping in the area. T-Times are a must as it does tend to get pretty busy.

Then it was time to leave. And sure enough, when we went to close the slide out, it would not move.

During the initial orientation, the RV tech had mentioned there was a manual way to retract the slides if something went wrong. That information was now hauntingly vague. I could not remember how to do it, and nothing about the situation inspired confidence.

I dug around in the pass through storage and eventually found a control board with a manual override switch that bypassed the computer. That felt promising. I figured out which button to push and tried again.

Nothing happened.

At that point, panic started to creep in. What were we going to do? I had no tools with me, no clear instructions, and no obvious way to get the slide closed. Leaving the campground was not optional, and towing the RV with the slide out was not happening.

I went back inside and started mashing the control buttons again, cycling through them with the kind of logic that only appears under stress. And then, suddenly, it moved. The slide out groaned, shuddered, and finally started to retract.

Just like that, the problem solved itself.

We got the slide out closed, hooked up the truck, and headed home. Once we arrived, we tried again – moved the slide out, and of course, it refused to close.

I spent some time studying the control board and quickly concluded the culprit was one of the relays – the electrical switch that takes a computer signal and converts it into an output to drive the slide out motor. In industrial plants, this is a classic point of failure in motor control circuits, so I had plenty of experience dealing with them.

I went on Amazon, ordered three or four replacement relays, and when they arrived, I swapped it out. Boom. Problem solved.

I am an engineer. This kind of troubleshooting is second nature to me. But I kept thinking about the normal RV owner faced with the same issue. YouTube was no help. Every manufacturer builds slide out mechanisms differently, and there is rarely a clear manual for troubleshooting or manually closing one when it fails. For most people, this problem would have been a source of panic, frustration, or a very expensive service call. For me, it was just another relay, for the lay person it was a difficult scenario to be faced with.