Mission Accomplished

                        I am happy (no… ecstatic would better describe it) to report that the needed repairs to our House on Wheels have been done! Both the Big Slide-Out and the Airbags have been worked on and that work has been completed very satisfactorily.

                        The large slide-out had remained slid-in for approximately Forty days (and nights) which is reminiscent of another event of Biblical Proportions. And while we did not encounter rains and flooding of that magnitude, our stay aboard our then squished-in ship felt like what Noah must have experienced being squeezed into a vessel with all those critters (even if there’s only just two of us) ‘cuz his “motorhome” was 300 cubits long, ours is but 24 cubits!

                        True to their word, the folks up at Country Classic got us in at the prescribed time which was waaaaay shorter than anywhere else! The next-best timing scenario was from Winnebago up in Iowa and that was sometime in the latter part of November! We were told by Country Classic “Give us two days’ notice and we’ get you in.” Well they obviously got more notice than that as we were still in Montana and our travels would bring us even further westward to Washington, Oregon, Utah, and Colorado before we made any turns to bring us back to the East Coast.

                        Tommy’s (Yetter’s Diner) parking lot never looked better on that Wednesday afternoon that we pulled in. And at 8 am the next day we were sitting at County Classic waiting for the boys to look us over. In a previous post I diagramed how these slide-ins work so I won’t bore you with a rehash of that but one does need to have some experience with how these things work and what may cause it to go kerflooey. These guys have it in spades because this is what they do. And they do it well! With about fifty (50!) Google Reviews, all with a perfect Five Star Rating…. well it just doesn’t get any better than that!

I was fairly sure that we were going to find some crunched gears or something of that nature, but the guys thought otherwise after “testing” it a few times. Sure enough, with a tad of sleuthing going on, a small gouge was discovered in the underneath of the slide-out indicating that something was scraping on it. One look under the sofa inside revealed the culprit, a small piece of wood that had been removed (by me four years ago) because it was marking up the floor. I stashed it under there in case it was needed again and after some bumps and such, it had worked itself loose and proceeded to “jam” itself, hindering the in and out progress of the slide.

                                                Ta-Daaa!   

                                                Just to make sure all was well, they lubed a few spots and checked a few more and in a total of two hours I was on my way with not even a bill to pay. I never expected that, and even though I had been in twice before for cosmetic work, I would not consider myself a regular customer! (I guess in this case being a regular customer of a body shop would not be very good thing to brag about!) So, to show our gratitude for a job well done we’re going to bring lunch over for the entire crew next week. We’re going to stay and partake of the victuals also…… it will be fun sitting there with them, I’m sure that we’ll hear some good “war” stories!

                                    Our next venture was over to Campbell’s in Lafayette, our go-to guys for all of the “underneath” maintenance stuff. Campbell’s is an authorized Freightliner maintenance facility, the place is immaculate, and they’re very friendly and easy to work with. This is the kind of place that you want to be a regular customer of. Not because something is always breaking (which does happen) but because you are performing and scheduling your periodic maintenance items as they need. That old adage, or commercial “You can pay me now, or pay me later,” could not ring truer when it comes to these big units. It’s one thing to stretch an issue and have a problem locally, it’s totally different when “local” is over two thousand miles away.

                                    This “airbag” issue is a good example.

                                    These puppies are expensive at almost $400.00 a piece and we have four of them. Only one (1) was giving us an issue, but we asked them to order four new ones for us, thinking that if one was bad could the others be far behind?

Then doubt starts to creep into the checking account part of your brain…..

Hmmm, what if the other three are still good? Maybe, it’s just one bad one…. Then you reluctantly (?) say, “Nah, let’s do ‘em all!”  

When I went out into the shop area and asked Sean (the mechanic) to see the others that came off, well there it was….. the tell-tale signs of what every rubberized aficionado fears…..

                        Dry Rot!

It was only a matter of time when the others would have poofed out on us also……. so, we paid them then 😊!

                        This is a place that treats us like we should be treated, maybe a little better. This is definitely a truck place, but we are definitely not truck drivers. A lot of those guys know their vehicles inside out and perform a lot of the periodic maintenance themselves. So when it comes to communications between them, well, they all speak the same language… “Yea your rizomizer‘s cam flangerizer has a few burrs on the semi-circular rotary plate just above the thermo-coupling indicating that your secondary fuel atomizer is delivering not enough PSI to run your motor efficiently.”

 Huh?

And even though I have some mechanical experience we get the regular-person version delivered with a genuine smile. “The scheduled maintenance of your fuel pump is coming up soon.”

 We feel very safe because we know that when these guys are underneath they are checking for “issues” before they become catastrophes.

That sums up the Maintenance Portion of today’s Post, and I’m afraid that there is no other Traveling News to report to you all. Texas is still clocking in at about 14 million degrees (Fahrenheit) so we’re gonna take our time going back and maybe stop along the way and see some sights.

We shall see.      

But don’t think that your traveling days are over just yet! It is only 66 days until we embark on the Majestic Princess for another Multi-Month Cruise, this time it will circumnavigate South America. You will be aboard with us, and we will all be jammed into another interior cabin because that’s how we get to afford these things! We will leave Los Angeles on December 1 and return on January 20 something in Fort Lauderdale. Since this is going to the extreme south of the Southern Hemisphere, (around Cape Horn) the voyage needs to be taken during their summer, which is our winter, hence the dates. As much as I would have preferred to go ’round Cape Horn in their winter, the powers-that-be in the Princess High Office thought better of subjecting their passengers to the famously tumultuous seas and weather that frequent that area at that time.

Rats!