At the end of our last post, Thomas and I had called it a day on the struggles that we had getting Holmes ready to go. Our washing machine had toppled from its pedestal to the floor of the closet, plus other little issues that the dealership needed to address. In the interest of time, I will try to summarize what happened.
Thomas headed out early for the long drive back to work. The service department towed Holmes from the campground to a service bay. While the work was being done, I attended four seminars that day. Some of the info was useful, but many of the classes were geared to driveable RVs as opposed to towable ones, such as we have. At the end of the day, the service department needed to keep Holmes overnight since they needed to wait for a new washer, as the first one died when it went crashing to the floor. The service department would deliver Holmes back to the campground at noon the next day, Tuesday. I decided to drive the hour and a half home as opposed to staying in a hotel near the campground.
Finally, I arrived home after a two and half hour drive due to nasty traffic. As I walked towards the house, I noticed that something was strange with the front passenger side tire on Watson. This is what I saw:
A gouge in the tire! And it was down to the belting. I hurried over to our local tire place. They could replace the tire, but the new tire wouldn't be in until the next morning. They could fit me in to get it installed later the next morning. Fine.
At 11:45 am the next day, while waiting for the tire replacement to be finished, I received a call from the campground. The county had just informed them that all of the water on the property would be shut off at noon. I asked them how I was expected to stay in the RV with no water. They told me that that was why they were calling, so that I could fill the tank with sufficient water to get me through. I explained that the water was to be shut off in 15 minutes and I was 90 minutes away getting my truck repaired. They were sorry, but the county left them no choice. ARRRGH! We decided that I would stay home and leave Holmes at the campground.
Now, our next challenge was that we had made a service appointment with an RV supply store to have a Sleep Number bed installed in Holmes. The mattress that came with Holmes originally was very uncomfortable. Thomas had scheduled a vacation day for Friday to help me hitch up Holmes and make the drive over to Camping World. We had purchased the bed prior to taking delivery of Holmes because the store was having a great sale on the Sleep Number beds. I had specifically called our dealership and asked them what size bed was installed. The service manager assured me that he had measured it himself and that it was a queen size bed.
On Friday morning, we drove from our home to the campground, hitched up and headed on over to Camping World, which was two exits north on the interstate. Everything went smoothly, the people at Camping World were awesome. They called us back to look at how the installation went. Disaster! We had ordered a queen bed, as we had been assured by the dealership that it was indeed a queen. Well, we walked in to see a queen bed in a king bed sized space!
Thankfully, Camping World had a king size bed in stock and switched it out, just charging us the difference in price and a bit extra for installation. They even honored the sale price, even though the sale had been over for more than a week. We were very grateful to them and furious at our dealership.
Aggravatingly, we still had to remain at the campground one more night. There was no way that we were hauling Holmes through rush hour traffic and then attempting to set up in the dark at our new park.
We made it to our new park home the next day and have been very happy here ever since! In the next post, I will describe our new park home and the process of very successfully selling our sticks and bricks home. Thanks for reading!
