The Curious Case of the Blue Ox

Today we arrived at the van, loaded up our gear, and got ready to take a quick road trip down to Tombstone.  I had just pulled the van out of our spot in the RV Storage place and was watching through the windshield as Kevin did a quick walk-around (where he checks tire pressure, makes sure all the outside compartments are closed, etc.)  When he got to the front of the van he looked up at me scowling and shaking his head.  This did not bode well.  I turned off the ignition and joined him near the front bumper.  One glance at this and I was scowling, too:

In that photo, it doesn’t look like much, but there are a couple of large chunks missing from the fiberglass bumper (the white spots near the step).  Here’s a close up:

There were all kinds of other cracks that led all the way up to one of the bolts holding the bumper in place.  Bummer, this was not the way we wanted to start our trip.  But how did it happen?  Like Sherlock Holmes and a very grumpy Watson, we approached the scene of the crime. 

Our RV storage place tries to conserve on space by fitting two vehicles into one long covered spot, usually a longer Class A Motorhome (looks like a huge bus) and a smaller vehicle (like our Class B van, or a short trailer, etc).  There’s a thin line of white spray paint indicating the boundary between the two spaces and Kevin was sure we had parked well behind it.  He began investigating a big Class A rig and noticed a very sharp tow bar at the back of it.  “I think this is what did it,” he said triumphantly.  I helpfully pointed out that he was not standing in our parking spot (H73) but in the empty spot next to us (H74).  Can you guess who was playing the part of Dr. Watson in this detective scenario?  Sure enough, when we moved the investigation over to our actual parking spot we noticed that not only did the motorhome sharing our spot have a sharp pointy tow bar, but there was also a debris trail of blue fiberglass leading up to where the front bumper of our van would have been.  A clue!  Here is a mugshot of the culprit:


If you look closely, you can even see a speck of our fiberglass on the pointy end of the apparatus.  Damn you, Blue Ox!
So off we trudged to the office to file an incident report with management.  It was pretty clear to us that the guy in the motorhome had backed into us, and when the manager came out and took a look at things, he concurred.  He said he knew the other owner so he’d contact him directly and have him give us a call.

There was nothing else to do at this point until we heard from the other guy, so we took a closer look at the bumper and realized it was still pretty firmly attached.  It was just a flesh wound and wouldn’t spoil our road trip to Tombstone, after all.  I guess our van is “too tough to die”.