What's That Smell? - (Indianapolis, IN)

Every once in awhile during our travels, we'll walk into our rig and some unusual, usually unpleasant, smell hits us.

We go through the usual routine of checking the refrigerator for spoiled food, smelling the kitchen trash, and generally doing a heavy breathing, flared nostril inspection.  We're not talking about holding tank odors - we use no chemicals and we almost never have odors inside the rig from the tanks.  That's a whole other Journal entry we won't get into now.  :)

Usually, Linda will find some food culprit.  It may be a leftover we forgot that got pushed to the back of the fridge, or it may be something else in there that got neglected.  Or it may be a potato that went too long, or some chemical reaction in the trash can.

But the slight odor that we started noticing yesterday (and couldn't find) seemed to be getting worse today.  We still couldn't pinpoint it.

We went on with our day.  We verified the smell wasn't us, but we got showers anyway.  :)  Then we spent some morning time with Sheila (she works from home), and then retired to our rig to get some work done.  With the door and windows open, the smell wasn't too bad.  And even Sheila didn't notice it when she came over late in the afternoon.

Since it was time for happy hour and Dan had just gotten home, Sheila and Linda threw together some coconut margaritas.

 

 

They toasted some coconut, dipped the glasses in honey, and then dipped them in the coconut.  They filled the glasses with their concoction from the blender and sprinkled some more coconut.

A couple of those, and we were feeling pretty good.  :) 

After happy hour in our rig, we went into the house where the gals put together another tasty meal.  We ate, talked, and watched a little TV before calling it a night.

Re-entering our home, the unknown smell had gotten worse.  Once again, we went to the refrigerator and the trash can and the pantry.  Nothing.   Hmm.  It seems to be coming from a floor vent.  I got down low sniffing each vent.  Eck.  Yep it seems to be coming from the one right here in the kitchen. 

Uh oh.  I starting connecting the dots.

Honey, I'm afraid we might have a dead critter in the basement.  Remember when the neighbors at the horse farm were putting traps in their compartments?  They asked me if we'd been having any rodent problems and I told them "Not that I know of".  And remember when we arrived here and you saw that mouse in the road?  Ya think we might have had some stowaways?

Well, it was too late to do anything tonight, so Linda covered all our vents and we left all the windows open.  Tomorrow, though we cleaned out the main basement and other compartments a couple days ago, we're going to have to get deeper into the guts of the rig and see what we can find.  I'm not looking forward to that, but hopefully we'll discover and fix the problem.

Sheesh.  It's always something.  :)

 

 

 

Comments

[Pat]

I was expecting the post to end with the fact that you are in Indiana and there's lots of dairies nearby. We call that Diary Air.

A Arizona Holiday

[The Bear II]

Must be a run on dead critters.

I've been noticing a dead smell outside our front door and also outside our back door at our house. I'm going to have to cutback a rosemary bush in front to find what has died there and in the back move a wood pile. I'm guessing both are possums or birds due to a large number of stray cats in the neighborhood lately.

[Sherry]

Those drinks looked and sounded delicious. I am SUCH a coconut lover. How about the recipe for those??

Sorry to hear about the stowaway. That's one of my yuck concerns.

Sherry

[Camille]

Yes, I'd love the recipe for those coconut margaritas too!

[Bill Malefyt]

This reminds me of a similar "dead" odor
we had in our park model in Egg Harbor, WI back in 2001. It turned out to be a dead Shrew that had chewed into our heating duct under the park model and then died. It was almost impossible to get to it, but we found a spray from a local cleaning service just for these situations and it worked after spraying a lot of it down all the vents. We knew it was a Shrew as we saw several of them which we later caught in mouse traps set under the unit. Good luck!