Day 4 at the Mothership

We stayed in Nappanee over the weekend... we enjoyed some walks around the area and driving around where we could see some of the countryside. 

Monday was day 4 at the mothership. Mike came to get Gracie at 6am; the weather was very nice so Miss Kitty stayed in the Jeep.

Carl went back to the Parts Department and looked at the plastic guides for the bay doors -- there are two different shapes. The price is $40+ and we would need 10...

... so he took a tracing of each of them. We think that we can make them for quite a bit cheaper.

Since Miss Kitty was in the Jeep, we had planned to sit in the larger outer non-pet lobby, but, it was full, so we went back to the pet lounge. Our newly met friends from last week were there, and the dogs were well behaved. About mid morning, a lady opened the door from the hallway and a little dog trotted in, "Does this dog belong to anyone in here?", she asked. Right, someone would have lost their dog and not noticed it? Of course, a loose dog in a pet lounge was not a good idea... someone went to find a leash, and I grabbed the dog (since I didn't have a pet to manage) to keep it from annoying the other dogs. The lady from the hallway said that it had come from the non-pet lounge in the lobby, so I went out there to ask if anyone there saw where it had come from -- one person said that it seemed to have come from the front doors. We found the receptionist and she contacted the vet office phone number on the rabies tag and they were to contact the owners.

Meanwhile, Carl was holding onto the dog in the pet lounge. Of course, it "piddled" on the floor, so I asked the dog owners what they would do to clean it up (bottle of Windex under the sink and paper towels on the counter).

Within about 30 minutes, the owner arrived. "Max" had been at her daughter's townhouse which is just on the other side of the campground; a door had been left open and Max got out. They had been concerned that he would have gone to the railroad tracks and were very concerned. Instead, he had walked up to the automatic doors at the Newmar facility, walked right in, and was immediately taken care of! What a funny little dog!

Meanwhile, Mike was still working on the Oasis hydronic heating system on Gracie...

He had to take things out of the bay next to where the Oasis system is located.

He had repaired the wires that were corroded and looked burned, but it still appeared that the second element was not working. Mike had spent a few hours on the phone with a tech at ITR (Oasis manufacturing company) going through debugging of the system. He was not able to get it completed on Monday... so we would be staying at the Mothership through to Tuesday.

We head to the Chicagoland area after we finish here -- we were hoping to be getting together with family and friends this week... and we have doctor appointments already scheduled. I went ahead and changed one appointment that I had for Wednesday afternoon to the week after Labor Day... but we have doctor appointments on Thursday and Friday that, if we cannot make them, we probably won't be able to get rescheduled... we'll need to get out of here by Wednesday at the latest - even if the second element isn't working!

Usually, when we're going for service, we know that the time could extend longer... but when our appointment was confirmed here, the email indicated it would be for 3 days. I was surprised that they would make that kind of estimate, but I figured that they know their product and they wouldn't have given me a time frame if they didn't know... well... not so much! We've heard from other owners that they allow at least a week after the estimated end date -- good to know! We'll know better if we end up coming back here in the future, and we probably will come back, because they do know *their* product here better than anyone else does. I think, however, that we have determined that, for us, for systems that are provided by other vendors (HWH jacks, Oasis hydronic heater, Freightliner chassis components, Cummins engine), we'd be better served by going to those vendors directly. We are not limited like those under warranty service to have those services provided by Newmar, so there is no reason to be tied to Newmar for those systems.