A step in the right direction | Living with Gleigh

Published 10:32 am Tuesday, July 15, 2014

My husband and I got to our campsite at Sequim Bay State Park on Wednesday, only to discover we (I? Well, that’s up for debate) left the step for the RV at the gas pumps in the Fred Meyer parking lot.

It’s just a plastic step I bought because the RV is 30 years old and the slide out step attached to the underside of the door is tearing off. One day several years ago when I stepped out onto it, it threw me, so I bought a fold up plastic step to use instead.

We stopped for gas before we headed out of town. While my husband pumped gas, I went into Fred Meyer to get some soda for the trip (I know soda is bad for us, move on). When I came out, I unlocked the camper door, put the step down to get in, closed the door, and stashed the soda in the fridge. Then I just climbed into my seat from the camper area (it’s all one big room). My husband opened the door and asked me to hand him something, so I may have forgotten about the step, but he was the last one standing in front of it.

As with many things that happen in my life, I had just been telling my hubby that I felt we needed a bigger, burlier plastic or metal step, because I felt like I was taking my life into my own hands over Fourth of July weekend every time I stepped down onto it.

And as it always is with my complaints to my husband about some aspect of our lives he doesn’t want to deal with (or spend money on), he said I felt that way because he had to raise the motor home a bit to level it and it must’ve seemed higher to me. “Still,” I said, “I think maybe it’s time for a bigger step.”

I’m 50 now, I could break a hip.

Okay, maybe it was a Freudian slip on my part to forget to pick up that step out of the Fred Meyer parking lot. But he was standing right there in front of it and I said, “Oh, yeah, the step,” and he didn’t pick it up. So after we hammered out the particulars over whose fault it was, we spent the first day we got to Sequim looking for a bigger, burlier step.

[“But I wanted that step for my shop,” he said.”It’s a $10 step,” I said.”But we owned that one,” he said. “And we can own another,” I said.]

Looking for a place that would have a bigger, burlier step was way more effort that it should have been. Sequim has a Home Depot, but they only had the same kind of step we left in the Fred Meyer parking lot. I told him Swain’s in Port Angeles would have a better one, but I had to prove how I knew it was a good place to get one.

“How do you know it’s there? Don’t you think it was in South Bend when we drove through five years ago and you’re thinking of that?””Because when I drove to Port Angeles in our Dolphin RV (10 years ago?), by myself with the kids and tried to hook up the electricity in my friend’s driveway, I discovered you left the converter plug at the last campground we were at. Her husband told me to go to Swain’s, they have everything.”

Then we drove by a 50 foot highway sign that said, “Swain’s: they have everything! [10 miles].” Now we own a bigger, burlier, higher plastic step that even my husband admits was worth the $8.27 we spent on it.

It was a step in the right direction.

Gretchen Leigh is a stay-at-home mom who lives in Covington. She is taking one step at a time. You can also read more of her writing and her daily blog livingwithgleigh.com or on Facebook at “Living with Gleigh.”