This is definitely not what I planned for today. We made it to our destination in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee… but Mr. Lemon decided to throw our biggest problem yet at us: the house alternator wasn’t charging. The Balmar was showing weak, inconsistent output (upper 20s to mid-30s amps, then basically nothing), and when I dug into the settings I found the alternator temp was way over the threshold. I even did a test (don’t recommend this) bumping the temp limit up just to see if it would wake up—and it did, until it overheated again and shut down. That’s when it clicked: this alternator is likely failing, probably a bad bearing, and the regulator is protecting it. From there it turned into a full-on Tennessee scramble: calling in reinforcements (huge shoutout to Keith), hunting parts, and leaning hard on super helpful people at Ricky’s RV and Napa. I ended up pulling the alternator in a gravel parking lot, only to find out the replacement they looked up by VIN wasn’t the right one because our van has two alternators. To top it off, we found a hairline crack in our coolant reservoir. The takeaway? Data matters (our battery app helped a ton), community is everything, and vanlife-ish means sometimes you’re just trying to find an RV park at 4:30 p.m. with 20–30% battery left.