On The Level

When I called 3Ts RV Service in Lake Havasu City, Arizona late Wednesday afternoon, a nice lady named Tina in their office had promised to have a replacement motor for our jacks and slide rooms to us here in Las Vegas yesterday, and sure enough, it was here by 11:30 a.m. Now, that’s great service!

I had heard good things about 3Ts before, and the RV Service Reviews website has some good customer reviews on their service. I wish that a lot of other RV shops and dealers were as honest and efficient, but it has been our experience that 3Ts is more the exception than the rule. That’s why we developed our RV Good Guys guide to reliable service and repairs on the road. When you’re broken down in a strange town, it’s nice to have somebody you can rely on.

The original electric motor had a label on it that said Made in Slovenia. When I opened the box with the replacement motor, I noticed that the new one has a label that says Made in China. Will outsourcing never stop?

I called Greg White to tell him that the motor had arrived, and a short time later he arrived and spent the next three hours under our motorhome getting the new motor installed, and checking to be sure that the rest of the wiring was in good shape. When Greg finally crawled out from under our coach, we went inside, fired up the engine, and our jacks and slides worked perfectly again! What would I do without my many friends who are always there for me? Well, I’d spend a lot of money, to be honest. Thanks for all of your help, Greg. I owe you (again).

Our Thousand Trails membership gives us 50 nights of camping a year in standard campsites at no charge, and any nights over 50 cost $5 a night. Most of the RV sites here at the Las Vegas Thousand Trails are pretty tight and don’t leave much room for parking cars or doing much outside. Our extended length van made things even tighter.

Having a neighbor sitting outside smoking, with the cigarette smoke coming in our open windows, wasn’t our idea of fun. We’ve had this happen several times before, and the offenders always say they smoke outside so that their RVs do not smell like cigarettes. No, instead, ours does! I used to enjoy an occasional cigar or pipe myself in the past, and I have nothing against smokers, as long as their habit doesn’t impact my life. When it does, that’s a different story.

Right across from our cramped RV site was a large corner site sitting empty, so I went up to the guard shack and asked about it. The ranger on duty said that it was a 50 amp electric site instead of the standard 30 amp sites, and there was an up-charge of $3 a day for it. The site is easily half again as large as the standard 30 amp site we were in, and I jumped on it. Here is a picture of our first site, now occupied by the Medallion fifth wheel in the center.

And here is our new site, which is much larger. We have more power, more space, more privacy, and all for $3 a day! It’s probably the best deal in Las Vegas!

My friend Judy Bayless, who presented two excellent seminars on genealogy at our Yuma rally, contacted me to tell me that Rootstelevision.com was one of the resources she planned to discuss in the seminar. But just days before the rally, she learned that the website was shutting down, so she removed it from the seminar.

Apparently the genealogy community raised such a hue and cry that the website is going to remain open, with commercial advertising now, to make it financially viable.  Judy said that Megan Smolenyak, who runs the site, is the author of the companion book to the Friday night NBC series, Who Do You Think You Are?  Roots Television is a free site with a ton of good genealogy material, including more than 700 videos of lectures, discussions, interviews, etc. I just checked it out and was very impressed! Give it a look, you may learn something about your own family tree!

Bad Nick stays as far away from manual labor as possible, so while Greg was working on the motorhome, he was busy writing a new Bad Nick Blog post titled And You Wonder Why We Have Problems? Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – You can do anything you want, but you can’t do everything. Especially all at once.