What a month! What a time to decide to become full-time RVers!
I do want to start out by saying that we are blessed to have the resources and ability to weather the COVID-19 storm this way. All the whining that creeps into the rest of this post doesn’t mean we aren’t grateful for being mostly healthy and in charge of our own destiny, when so many others aren’t.
My last post was from Monday March 2nd. We were expecting to wend our way to Grass Valley in time to take possession of our RV on Thursday March 5th. The RV had, in theory, arrived at the dealership on the previous Friday.
On Tuesday, at an overnight hotel stop at the Plaza Inn & Suites Ashland, Dave contacted our dealer, Nate, to just double check the coach would be ready for us. It turns out, it hadn’t left Indiana on Feb 24th, but was on its way now. So that meant it wouldn’t even arrive at the dealership until Friday, and wouldn’t be ready for us to drive away till March 10th at best. Bit of a shock, but oh well, we’ll stay an extra night in lovely Ashland and then get an Airbnb in Grass Valley for a few days.
On Thursday, we again ask: “Any update?” (we almost NEVER get proactive communication from our dealer!) and find out that it’s in Eastern Wyoming and would arrive on Friday.
On Monday March 9th, we find out that that the RV never left Indiana. It was still sitting on a delivery company lot. That company had lied repeatedly. This news FINALLY got our dealer to wake up and find out what the heck was going on. They contacted Newmar, who promised to get the RV back from the delivery company and use one of their own drivers to get it to Grass Valley. And the next day, a Newmar manager called us and (mostly) apologized and offered us some compensation that will somewhat defray our extra costs.
All of this was too late, though. We had to get back to Redmond to vacate our rental house. The lease would be up by March 25th, and we no longer trusted a single word about when the RV would arrive. We were also getting increasingly worried that COVID-19 travel restrictions could leave us without both a rental house and RV!
So we headed back north, RV-less and dispirited.
Interwoven with this were a couple of medical events. As we were dropping down from the Siskyous on the way south, Dave had a sudden shower of floaters in his left eye. We managed to get an emergency appointment at an eye clinic in Grass Valley for the next day. They diagnosed a spontaneous retinal tear, and referred Dave to the retinal clinic in the same block, where they laser-welded it back together.
And on the way back north, I had a bout of miserable food poisoning at the hotel in Grants Pass, probably as a result of a “didn’t quite taste right” lunch at a restaurant earlier that day.
We got back home on March 12th, after one of our least successful trips ever! Top photo: the optimism of setting off from Redmond. Bottom photo: the flatness of returning again with no RV.
Being back in our rental was a surreal experience because (with our permission, expecting we’d have no use for it once we had an RV) Mikey had emptied the place of almost all furniture. This ended up being our couch for a week, and the computer monitor and Chromebook was how we watched TV.
On March 14th, we were sent photos of our RV on the dealer lot, finally. But it would be another 10 days, filled with the chores of vacating our rental and the drive south again, before we would lay eyes on it. The move was much more complicated than it would have been with the RV–we had to pay a company to take stuff over to the garage in Mikey’s rental house to store till we could move it into the RV eventually.
On Friday March 20th, we vacated the rental (movers at 9am, trash truck at 10am) then hit the road at noon. With the virus shutting down all dine-in restaurants, we would eat take-out sitting on the curb at Walmart parking lots while charging the Bolt!
We got to Grass Valley with just a single overnight stop at a Best Western in Sutherlin (where we could plug the car into a Level 2 charger). It felt best to do the journey as fast as possible with as little contact with the rest of the world as possible. We checked into the Grass Valley Courtyard Suites, initially for just 3 days, though we ended up spending a full week there. Superb place–can’t recommend it enough!
Another backstory to all of this. Dave’s company is a start up that provides telehealth services. It’s had a steady rise in businesses using its services, especially by mental health therapists and family counselors. But the COVID-19 situation has caused a huge spike in demand for telehealth, across all disciplines. So the system was suddenly stressed tested unlike ever before. So Dave has been working whenever possible to keep the system running despite the demand. Here’s the setup in the hotel in Grass Valley:
Monday March 23rd: we finally set foot in our RV.
Yes, that’s about how enthusiastic I felt at this point!
The paperwork completion process happened in isolation. The papers were left in the RV and the dealer talked us through them via phone. They didn’t want to touch the RV once we moved in because of the virus risk and the inability to achieve 6 foot spacing in such a confined space. The walk through also happened in isolation: the dealer was in an identical RV talking us through everything. As much of a disappointment as he has been to this point, he really did seem to know the coach very well.
We decided to leave the RV plugged into the dealer hookups at least for a couple of days. Once it became apparent that they literally weren’t willing to touch the RV (even the outside of it) to service things, it started to seem like we’d be best off waiting here until 14 days has elapsed since leaving WA, so they could no longer consider us “high risk”. So we are still here, in a rather unattractive location, but the dealership is a ghost town, so it’s rather quiet. Our RV is the one facing directly toward the camera, with the blue Bolt next door. All the other RVs are for sale.
I slept my first night in the RV on March 26th, while Dave stayed back at the hotel for one last night coding away. March 27th we moved fully into the RV, 3 weeks after we had expected to.
Dave’s three-monitor configuration is all setup in the garage area at the back of the RV where he is tapping away keeping ClockTree humming along.
Now what? Who knows. We need to get back to WA to pick up the rest of our stuff from Mikey’s garage. But Dave needs to keep working on ClockTree, and the travel restrictions get ever harder. We could stay put here for a while, but the dealer will make us move on eventually, so once that has happened, we might as well get home. In the meantime, we are well stocked on food and other supplies, so we are nicely self-contained.
This entry was posted in RV 2020