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Pat and I left home on our western tour October 9th headed for Denton, TX. Our good friends and Foundation 100! Members, Revs Marty and Maria Luna-Wolfe recently moved to the Denton church and we were looking forward to seeing them again. Our contact, Chris (and now a new Foundation 100! Member, too!), was so thoughtful and helped us with every need we could have had. The music director, April was great, too! Chris and April, along with Rev Maria, even helped us load our equipment in the pouring rain Sunday afternoon. We were all soaked but they were glad to have the rain after the long drought in Texas so we couldn’t complain too much! We had a great time! The congregation was wonderful to us and we look forward to visiting them again!
Our adventures began in route from Denton to Albuquerque, NM… We had no heat! Our dash/defroster wasn’t working. We had the RV furnace but no defroster! It wasn’t an issue for us yet but we knew that the need was coming in only a few weeks as we started north. We also knew that getting it fixed in the time frame we had was going to be difficult. Our experience is that most RV dealers schedule repair appointments 3-4 weeks in advance. So Pat started calling… first we called a Ford dealer in Albuquerque. They said that was a National RV issue… The National RV dealer said, “we’ll have to look at it and order parts, it shouldn’t take more than 10 days!” To which our response is, “we can’t stay anywhere for 10 days!?” Thus our saga begins…
We arrived at MCC Albuquerque on Friday evening just as the church spaghetti supper had begun; they ushered us in for a lovely dinner including some homemade New York style cheesecake… Mmmmm… We met CeCe, our contact for the weekend, and made preparations for the concert and Sunday services. The weekend went wonderfully!
Then on Monday, we set out to the RV dealer… the tech stuck his head in the engine and looked around but couldn’t find what was wrong (even though we had already told him what needed to be repaired). We even put him on the phone with our dealer at home and they decided that it could not be fixed without the part which would take at least 10 days to order and receive. We didn’t have that long… we were due in Tucson, AZ in 5 days! We quickly learned that no repair tech would take our word (or our dealer’s for that matter) on what the issue was… each one had to diagnosis the issue and THEN order the part. This was going to be a much bigger deal than we anticipated!
Again… en route from Albuquerque, NM to Tucson, AZ and the dash heater was still not fixed. During the entire trip between these two cities, Pat was on the phone with our dealer, the manufacturer, Ford and finally a repair facility in Tucson. And about 150 miles from Tucson the repair shop tells us that if we can get there before 4:00 they can look at the RV. Yikes! So we drove without stopping or eating and pulled in about 5 minutes to 4:00… Pat ran out and talked to the service person, she told us that they didn’t take new repairs after 4 and we would need to come back on Monday. We were not happy people! “What?” Pat exclaimed, “Your service department told us that you could see us and now you say that we need to come back on Monday?” They said, “Sorry” and sent us away even after we explained our plight.
So we drove over to Water Of Life MCC and parked our rig. Halloween was the next week and we were invited to the church Halloween dance the following night… What a hoot!
Sunday morning, we sang in service and then the concert that evening. We had a good turn out and WOL is always an appreciative group! Thank you Pastor Gale, Beth and WOL!
Monday morning we were up and at the repair shop at 7:00 a.m. We waited and waited… About 4:30 that afternoon, they told us they couldn’t find anything wrong… “What?” They proceeded to show us that the dash was blowing hot air… to which I explained… “Excuse me, but it is 80 degrees out, the engine is running and we are sitting on asphalt, don’t you think it might be blowing hot air due to that?” They said, “Try it in the morning when it is cooler and if it doesn’t work, bring it back.” OK so here we are with obviously (shall we say) below average repair techs, it is now November, we are due in Washington State in 10 days and have no defroster. We started north the following day… and no the defroster didn’t work.
