It’s Only Money

Can you think of anything worse than getting up at 6 AM? I can. How about getting up at 6 AM so you can spend a lot of money on RV repairs?

We were told a tech would be coming by shortly after 7 AM yesterday to move our motorhome into a bay here at the Spartan facility. Miss Terry was up by 5:30, but she let me sleep in another half hour, which was still way too early. Sure enough, by 7:15 a nice tech was at our door. He put on paper booties to come inside and plastic sheeting over the driver seat and drove the RV away. I know these guys are experts at what they do, and they drive RVs everyday, but I still get a little twinge when I see my home on wheels going away with somebody else behind the wheel.

Spartan has a very nice customer lounge, with television and comfortable chairs and couches to relax on, even a couple of recliners. So we spent most of the day sitting and waiting, reading our Kindles while the talking heads on Fox News jabbered away endlessly. There were two or three other couples in for service and we chatted with them for a while about RVing and the RV lifestyle.

A little before noon, Terry and I drove into town for lunch at the Eaton Place restaurant. It was a nice place with good down-home cooking and fast, friendly service. Another of those great small-town places that are so much better than the generic chain restaurants you can find at every interstate off ramp in the country.

The folks here in Charlotte, Michigan are some of the friendliest we’ve run into anywhere. Everybody we talked to here at Spartan or in town has been very nice. After lunch we walked around and popped into a few stores downtown, and received a nice welcome everywhere we went. Charlotte is a well-groomed town. In one block we saw two old-fashioned barbershops almost next door to each other, and another one across the street. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a real working barber’s pole outside of a shop, and here there were three of them. How cool is that?

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, a couple of weeks ago when we were in Kansas a huge wind gust caught us and seemed to lift the front end of the motorhome and dropped it back down. It gave us a real start, and almost immediately I noticed that the Winnebago didn’t seem to handle as well as it did before. Even with the Safe-T-Plus steering control that we had installed at Redlands Truck & RV Performance Center before we started our summer travels, after that incident sometimes it felt like we were driving on marbles. That was when we decided to come to Spartan to have the factory check it out.

The diagnosis was that we needed the ball joints and a tie rod replaced, and we also had a leaking wheel seal on front driver’s side. They worked on the coach all day, and we were hoping to get done and back on the road by the end of the day. But they still needed to do a full alignment after finishing the front end work, and they ran out of time. So we will stir the Jell-O that all fulltime RVers write their schedules in and hang out here over the weekend. We’ve got 50 amp electric, and plenty of fresh water on board, and even a halfway decent 4G Verizon signal. What more can we ask?

Well I guess that we could ask our fairy godmother to make a large deposit into our bank account to cover the cost of repairs, but she is a fickle old gal, I won’t depend on it too much. But what the heck? It’s only money, right? Or, to put in other terms, it’s only 1,500 copies of one of my Big Lake books. Anybody in a mood to do a lot of reading? 🙂

Speaking of e-books, my pal Donna “Froggi” McNicol is giving away several of her stories free this weekend for Father’s Day. Check out her Amazon Author’s Page for details.

Thought For The Day – There are more important things in life than a little money, and one of them is a lot of money

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