Last year’s travels were laden with mechanical failures and fixes for the first few weeks. Along the way Tim found us a repair shop in Jackson, Mississippi where we met the owner, a wonderful young man who was not only a competent mechanic, but a truly good person. Tim stayed in touch with him since back then so it was only fitting that we return to this shop with the few repairs and upgrades to spruce up Gladys. A spa day for the coach if you will.
On the list was a new Pioneer radio in the dash, a color rear view camera to always show us where we’ve been and a 5 Star Tune something or other to make driving smoother. But the main thing was fixing the leveling system. This is a hydraulic system that lowers four corner legs to level the coach when we’re parked at a site that is not level. There were some issues with the system last year with them not working correctly and setting off warning lights and alarms that reminded me of movie scenes of a radiation leak in a nuclear power plant.
There are structural reasons that an RV must be level when parked and the legs must be completely up when driving. Since Tim is the technical writer of the family and I am just comic relief, he can explain all of that. I will tell you that spending a week or so in a carnival fun house does strange things to one’s equilibrium.
Tim here…
Good explanation of the goals we had for this visit to the repair shop, but of course when traveling in an RV too often your plans don’t play out exactly as one would hope.
The detailed logistics I had planned for had us staying 5 nights at a campground about 30 minutes from the repair shop. Stay over there the day we arrived then drive to the shop the next day, get the repairs & installations finished, and head back to camp. Sounds simple enough?
But in the end my best laid plans did not take into account the impact of one rather significant, and potentially disruptive factor: our five day stay was over the Christmas holiday. While this had been discussed with the repair shop in advance and we were told that this timing wouldn’t be an issue and could easily be worked into the schedule, it didn’t exactly work out that way.
Turned out that one first night at the campground would be the last we’d see of the place as we would spend the next four nights parked at the repair shop.
Not that bad a campsite and we did have water and electric but just not all that “Christmassy“.
A number of factors including parts availability and employee family matters contributed to this unanticipated lengthy stay here. But in the end, even though the original plan did not work out we did manage to get almost all of our issues resolved. Almost because the primary item we wanted to get fixed, the levelers not working properly, would have to wait for another day given the part needed was not to be found locally requiring us instead to place an order online to be delivered to our next step where hopefully I could install it myself. Stay tuned…